"Perdido" by Chase Twichell (Faber and Faber, 1992)

Poems (nearly all of them longer than a page) from many good American magazines. I highlighted several passages. Some sound like poetry to me, some are too puzzling.

• Gravity draws down to me a halo whipped up of holy dust or dust from outer space: dim chalk of moonlight, phospher, youth in the eyes of my former selves. (p.6)

  I like the sound of this. Having "down" and "up" so close together confuses my mental image.

• The hotel’s heating system blurts sporadic clouds into the faint geometry of unlit monoliths beyond a flimsy Spanish balcony (p.9)

  Here (and elsewhere) is a passage where each noun has an adjective.

• The flip side of a wish is a fear, and that was why we crushed the heaven from those darkened rooms. How easily the stubborn pearl hoarded up and gave away its infinite concentric mysteries (p.10-11)

  Recognisable poetry.

• Minnows glittered in the shallows, a school of compass needles fixed on a single dream (p.18)

  She can come up with quotable images. I struggle with some of the passages between. Her poems are longer than I'm used to.

• Beloved is a word concealing four sharp points, four kinds of innocence, four winds of change (p.20)

  I don't get that.

• The palms go on sharpening their long, invisible blades, and the sea erasing its infinity of names (p.22)

  Palms (trees) and the sea feature in several of these poems.

• I dreamed the structure of the self. It had a queer, disorderly geometry something like the atom’s, designed to be interactive (p.26)

  Something like the atom's? In what sense?

• We lie in a flood of white sand under the broken prism of the sky, watching its fragile rays disappear down the secretive avenues of palms (p.31)

  That adjective-noun fixation again. Would a "broken prism" produce the light effects she experienced?

• I can see that I’ve kept this story caged in the past tense as though the present were a spectator come to gaze at the wild thing up close, but it’s easy to lie with metaphor (p.40-41)

  Not a new concept, but I've not seen it rendered this way before.

• Sex had become a well into which I could throw the trash of all my sorrows (p.41)

  Again, a neat image.

• Sleep itself is a shadow, a heavy, invisible wave that swells and breaks over us where we lie in the moonlight dried white on our sheets (p.42-43)

  Sleep, sea, moon - elemental ideas. Earlier I quoted "dim chalk of moonlight". I like this dried white image more.

• all the while watching the pleasure boats glide past us trailing bits of broken mirror, their engines pulsing steadily, fueled by what's left of the future. (p.55-56)

  Earlier we had "broken prism". I prefer this image of a wake. I don't think final image survives much analysis, though I like the sound of it.

• Like pain, such joy is locked in forgetfulness, and the prisoner must shout for freedom again and again (p.57)

  Another image I like.

• Atoms! Each one a window through which the wilderness of the future leaks, poor water blank as infancy. (p.67)

  I've quoted "atoms" and "future" before. I think the words have different associations for her than for me. I don't get that final line.

My favourite is “The Condom Tree”