Though he first gained notice for his academic study The English Elegy, Sacks, who grew up in South Africa and now teaches at Harvard, has emerged in the last five years as a poet of some influence: recent work (like that in O Wheel) combines abstract, staccato lines and fragments with large philosophical ambition. This sixth book of poems both continues that evolution and demonstrates some problems it entails. Many of these one- and two-page poems evoke the sweep of global history, or the traumas of modern and Homeric war. Following archeological objects, symbolic rivers or mythical battlefields, Sacks can be both passionate and specific, as in "Horizon" or "Head," where, regarding parts of a wood-and-ivory carving, he writes: "do not// come home, they say, begin again, take all the time that's left, take Africa." More often, though, Sacks's tactics become frustratingly indefinite—nor do they seem entirely his own. "Where's the background?" one poem asks. "Why isn't there a background// sound?" Rhetorical questions like that one; key words like "slip & spillage," "choice" and "lining"; self-referential sentence-fragment openings ("The body quarreling, as if from inside it can know its place"); single-line stanzas; poems whose titles are dates ("28.XII.99"); Heideggerian declarations; and breathy parentheticals like "given the scarcity (given freedom)"—all make these poems indistinguishable from the lesser recent work of Sacks's influential spouse and colleague Jorie Graham, who has been refining their devices for the last 15 years. Though the two poets' influence on each other must now be mutual, rather than one-way, Sacks's volume too often seems merely to replicate Graham's concerns and styles (compare even the book's portentous one-word title to Graham's recent Swarm
and Never), without taking them anywhere genuinely new in this particular work. (May)
