No Planets Strike
Josh Bell
Zoo Press, $14.95 (paper)

Josh Bell’s first book of poems takes its title from a description in Hamlet of the Christmas season as a time when no ghosts walk the earth and “no planets strike.” The collection itself, however, abounds with ghosts: the personae Bell speaks through alternately haunt or are haunted by ex-lovers and deities, often a combination of both. In “Poem to Line My Casket with, Ramona,” the speaker advises his muse and recounts the details of their affair: “This is the time to watch what eats you. / . . . You used to dangle the remote, and I’d come get it.” The cool vernacular of the latter opens onto wonderfully vulnerable lines such as “But oh, how it was me that loved you then,” as if the poet suddenly can’t stand his own imaginative prowess and pushes it aside to reveal something so common as a heart. In “Zombie Sunday,” Bell engages in the precise metaphysical searching characteristic of Rilke, a poet whom he otherwise resembles very little. A tortured speaker, who is both tired and terrified of God’s works, complains to a “gentle-handed holy father, or whomever” about a nagging piece of music which has been invented to replace “the load-bearing voices we misplaced so long ago.” The involuted logic of the poem meets the sublimity of its subject matter, so that by the poem’s end the reader comes to believe the words of the poem are those which the cracked speaker pines after, divine words that “will help us fall apart in the arranged directions / like any good orchestra.” Bell attempts to repeat the successes of the Ramona poem and “Zombie Sunday” by allowing these poems to originate series, and while the poems in these series are always inventive and skillful, they rely on previous gestures and tones, and so seem to force an urgency from what began as an exercise. Nonetheless, throughout No Planets Strike, Bell delivers on his promise to “burn the very Latin from the world,” insisting on grief-stricken gutturals often undercut by wry or Dadaist humor that prove him to be one of the most tonally versatile young poets working today.

—Tanya Larkin

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My Devotion
Clayton Eshleman
Black Sparrow Books, $16.95 (paper)

Clayton Eshleman’s My Devotion appears more than five years after his last extended collection of poetry, From Scratch, and in wake of his celebrated Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld. While Juniper Fuse presents itself as the culmination of 25 years of research into the emergence of autonomous imagination, and therefore as Eshleman’s magnum opus, this new collection offers a more intimate gathering of recent poems on perennial themes. Broken into five parts, My Devotion begins with poems of the world, records of atrocity read as ethical incantations—Buchenwald, Vietnam, Afghanistan. “Life is obscene,” Eshleman writes, “because of our ability to live with eros conjunct with / violence.” Eshleman’s is a situated moral voice, capable of sinking tremors into our complacency. These elegies grow personal in part two and burden the love poems of part three with anticipations of loss, specifically the loss of his beloved intimate partner, Caryl. “She is a spirited companion”; a dream, for him, in flesh; company, comfort, and source. The poems of part three record their life together, suffused now in the tenderness of twilight, and terrorized by physical pain. In part four Eshleman continues his research into the origins of consciousness in the painted caves, attempting to formulate a poetics of visionary anthropology: “thinking at / the speed of limestone”; “the limestongue off which stagstalk is struck.” Eshleman’s poems are encounters with rock, descriptions of the caves, renderings of images; words of tenderness and terror that seek the origin of poetry in a primal scream. Eshleman extends, contorts, and twists line, breath and syntax; he fractures words in puns and wordplay, contradictions and conjunctions; seeks consciousness in combustion. He “dream[s] of poems that could change something essential / about the way a few people view creation.” Where the instant meets the eternal, the conditional the cosmic, for Eshleman, poetry is the practice of paradise.

—Stuart Kendall

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Povel
Geraldine Kim
Fence, $14 (paper)

In her first book, the 22-year-old Korean-American poet Geraldine Kim chronicles her life in prose stanzas that she describes as “helical,” alternating justification from left to center to right to center, back and forth across over a hundred pages. Although the text initially presents itself as a brilliantly condensed, Joycean stream of consciousness, the subject matter never escapes the insular world of a 21st-century American teenager: pop music, cable TV, consumer brands, food, Internet culture, school, cell phones, budding sexuality, and parents. “Stealing carrot sticks from the cafeteria,” writes Kim. “It says ‘Shortcuts’ on the bag. . . . My Met Studies teacher asks us who has ever stolen anything. I would have raised my hand if I hadn’t been busy writing. Better left unsaid, I decide.” The problem with this limited purview is that the text never really resonates outside its own range, often reminding one of a teen blog or yearbook entry. That said, Kim’s confessions are honest (brutally so), and her verbal skill must be unparalleled among poets her age. Her syntax shifts from complete sentences into fragments and back again, yet remains relaxed and reflects her book’s grander design, mesmerizing the reader: “The woman sitting in front of me reclines in her seat. Everyone dressed like a funeral. A funeral bus. Wanting to act intoxicated. My high school teacher freshman year was surprised when I said I didn’t know what ‘inebriated’ meant.” But Povel is also a clever send-up of the narcissism of its own brand of formal innovation, as evidenced in the work’s painfully self-conscious textual scaffolding: a fake introduction claiming Lyn Hejinian as its author; 200 endnotes, such as “Hello Kitty has to go potty” and “Why do we chase pigeons?”; and blurbs on the back that identify their authors as “former teacher of Geraldine Kim.” And it is appropriate that this impressive debut ends with a page titled “WTFHJN (What The Fuck Happened Just Now)” that encourages readers to record their reactions to the wonderfully bizarre hybrid (Povel = poem + novel) they have just read.

—Aaron Belz

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Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets
edited by Brett Fletcher Lauer and Aimee Kelley
Verse Press, $19.95 (paper)

Filled with well-armed poets and wrapped in a pink cover, this anthology is the perfect Trojan Horse to infiltrate those twin citadels of predictable poetry: weddings and Valentine’s Day. Unhampered by editorial insistence on what a “love poem” need be, these pieces are as funky and individual as our loves. Aside from some slow opening pages owing to the contents’ alphabetical arrangement, Lauer and Kelley’s hands-off approach kisses the theme anthology back to life. Many poets’ work here comes from their own previous, less loving, collections, and the shifts in context are fertile. We have the lone yak’s love for “the black and white horse / in the farthest pasture” (Oni Buchanan); worker bees’ desire for their queen, “mouths / at her belly, counting / her breaths, the buzz” (Nick Flynn); the “Woe” of spiritual lament that “A breeze tosses / light sentencery // for God loves me // and hid me next to you” (Ethan Paquin); and the nature poem borrowing “the wet, green, denuded / careen of this not ours // to love” (Aaron McCullough). Conventional approaches to love are also tackled, and sometimes tweaked: direct address, heartbreak, and hope make their appearances. Cate Marvin’s rending “Alba: Aberdeen” finds its color scheme deepen from white morning light to a sky “incapable of anything bluer” as it updates its ancient premise: “Your wife is waking // for work. We are almost / asleep, in our separate rooms.” Readers will note, however, a new and pervasive strain in this collection: ambiguous address to the lover who is missing but not unavailable. This is the lover out of cell range, rather than the lover as suicide: “I have enjoyed these hours more / with you not by my side” (Jeff Tweedy). Our separations are pleasurable not because of the beloved’s absence, but for what this absence’s temporary pain allows us: silence, thought, love, sometimes even a poem.

—Robert Strong

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In her third book of poetry, Ledger, Susan Wheeler records “synesthesia . . . and sound, / the junco’s chirp and then the jay’s torn caw, arc / of trucks on the distant interstate, your what the fuck.” Collage, disjunctive syntax, parataxis, and fragmentation invite the reader to take into account the relationship between parts, chart gaps and compute new meaning, and add her own voice in the tally, so that the “bright expanse yields up to You.” Numerous voices of multiple registers and vernaculars gather on the lines and make “the ironic caw of . . . crows flapping.” Old pieces of language have been scavenged and made new from a heap of source texts including 17th-century religious poetry, the Book of Common Prayer, and writings on contemporary economics. A notable formal range collects “the jangling discourse of our nation”—from the villanelle “Song of Deserving” and the sonnet “The Green Stamp Book” to long free-verse improvisational assemblages like “The Debtor in the Convex Mirror.” This last piece, a long ekphrastic poem that won the sixth annual Boston Review poetry contest, takes its title from John Ashbery’s celebrated “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and is written in response to a painting that was itself a response to a painting—just one instance of the way these poems encourage the reader to scrap myths of originality, aesthetic purity, and essence for the example of a speaker who “in the country of individuation . . . struck out / like a match / for the gravid coast.” To “the grasping soul . . . unredeemed” Ledger tenders a generative openness, multiplicity, vitality, and wisdom—“for if we want riches in life, what be greater bounty / than the knowledge that triggers all things?”

—Heidi Lynn Staples

Originally published in the January/February 2006 issue of Boston Review