£8.95 for maybe 100 pages of poetry!
Is "Nocturne" Pinskian or Pinskyesque? "Cicada" section III is a novelistic aside about 2 people awake in bed, neither wanting to disturb the other. It wouldn't be out of place in a novel. That doesn't disqualify it from being used in a poem though after a while, one wonders. "Blueprint" section III begins "The Lord so loved the world he sent a steaming pile of lasagna for my ninth birthday. A plate". Decide for yourself where the 5 line-breaks of that passage might be most effectively placed or whether they should be there at all - perhaps they're typos like "dangerouis" in section I. "Visit" is in couplets, but there are 3-line and 4-line stanza'd poems too. There's quite a range of content, especially along the discontinuity/continuity dimension. Here's some flirting with meta-poetry -
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Tulip Tree Out late and the night is a ruin, my voice says the night is a ruin, my voice doesn't say a thing, my poem says my voice doesn't say a thing, your voice says my poem says my voice doesn't say a thing. Your parents own the tulip tree we lie under, but they don't own the night. ... |
The next is more prosaic
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Mechanic Wall, 1982 In school a wall kept the other half of the sixth-grade class mysterious to us. Miss Rush would make it part on holidays, for awful parties where we weren't allow to flirt. When her echo, Miss Costello, shouted Go the wall slowly withdrew into itself ... |
I had a classroom just like that when I was about 8, but what's all that indentation about? Here's a more fractured example - the second section of Self-Storage
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America the widow sorting through his drawer of fisted socks. The ice shedding itself inside the water glass. The diagnosis. The dozen childlike men begging for medication. The monkey screaming behind iron bars. Tender objects: the dried corsage. America a certain model motorcycle, rare Beatles butchered baby cover safe, all safe, all out of sight. |
Widow or widower? Anyway, I like this latter style of his the most.
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