Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things: New and Selected Poems

The first collection in years from the reclusive Gallup (Where I Hang My Hat; Above the Treeline) spans four decades and brings much of the poet's lyrically disjunctive small-press work back into print. Gallup, a member of what John Ashbery once dubbed the ""soi disant Tulsa School"" wing (Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett) of the New York School, employs a semidetached colloquial tone that allows a kind of incidentally metaphysical sensibility to permeate his work: ""...and you will radiate around you candor and a vacancy,/ and leave behind you an orange brightness of fearful aptitude."" A cubist and Dada-informed irreverent quality that often takes shape through the formal dislocation of sense runs through much of Gallup's work from the '60s, and generally remains fresh: ""Vase knee lop, Unguented an'/ Interred d'old tram are:/ O Me! Lassoo dolent enter,/ Come! O Dig! So Far!"" Gallup's poetry is at its strongest when he designs narrative surfaces that appear to vanish and reappear transformed with each passing line: ""Thoughtless electronic designs/ Fold in and out through the trees/ Following the late news/ Which is to see a man/ Picking up the words as they fall/ Like a ring of keys in the hallway."" Gallup disengaged from the literary world in the early '80s and often seems to be aiming in his poems for a world utterly removed from this one, but this collection should reestablish him as a present source of poetic invention as well as independence: ""I do not wish to speak/ Of the decrepitude of the times/ For I long ago set them aside/ To contemplate another world/ Where my thoughts are mine."" (Feb. 1)