M and Other Poems

Peck's difficult collections do not appear often. More than 10 years separate 1978's The Broken Blockhouse Wall from 1991's Poems and Translations of Hi-Lo, the middle pair of his four volumes. However, the poems in 1993's Argura and in this new volume suggest that Peck has become more comfortable-and prolific-with his stylistic combination of elements from two heroes: the detailed imagery of Ezra Pound and the conceptual coherence of Yvor Winters. In this volume, Peck is grittier than he has ever been. In ""So the Name of that Place Was Taberah,"" he juxtaposes the vast reach of Chicago's slaughterhouses with the vulnerable core of an individual: ""stench from the slaughterhouses steaming east,/ black bascules yawning above acid, the brain's imbalances like yeast// ...biography eclipsed in the black chantry of childhood, and second sight/ in slag with its magma suns under looming gantries."" The final piece in this collection, ""M: A Poem in Ten Chapters and One Thousand Lines,"" is an exhaustive-and sometimes exhausting-account of some of the poet's travels, especially through France and Italy, that reveals the ways that the poet's ""double will shake off his gray cloud, the phantom/ of what I had been greeting the unknown that I am."" Peck's densely allusive and highly cerebral work rewards the rigorous reading that it demands. (Nov.)