cover image BITTERS

BITTERS

Rebecca Seiferle, . . Copper Canyon, $14 (158pp) ISBN 978-1-55659-168-6

Until the final two smaller-scale, mostly confessional sections, most of the subjects and objects in Seiferle's third, double-length collection have explicitly Godlike or Christlike qualities: maggots, weather systems, a hedge, Galileo's middle finger, a wheezing "song/ clenched between God's teeth." A number of pieces are aesthetically heightened retellings of Judeo-Christian scripture; others rework Hindu, Hopi, Mayan and other spiritual traditions. Great lines sometimes result, as in a passage describing an earth-like "shattered piñata, its skin torn away,/ revealing an inner framework like the crushed spine of some unspecified, living creature, gutted/ and consumed, twisted in weird revolutions, hanging from the hook." The collision of the exalted and the everyday produces far less stirring results when a girl asks her father to buy her a candy bar, and "barters with him/ as Abraham bargained with God." Yet poem after poem struggles, genuinely, toward terms for rethinking religious belief and reincorporating it into daily life—and for merely comprehending the latter in other lands: "Four villagers/ were killed as the gunman sprayed his getaway./ Tonight in Copán Ruinas, someone else is childless, motherless, fatherless./ It's not magic how things keep disappearing." The terms never quite materialize, and the poems can founder in abstract exhortation ("We will have to find another/ language, if we want another world"), but Seiferle's speaker seems to realize this, and toward the end of this long book, bitters emerge as "something vegetable,/ persistent, extending roots into the world," something that for "[w]ho tastes it,/ tastes sweet earth." It's a grounding that will work for some readers better than others, but no one will doubt the efforts exerted throughout. (Nov.)