(3 of 6)
he's about five inches taller
than a taxicab.
The poet's concerns, for the most part, trick the reader into seeing life afresh, as when he remarks that his nose is growing old.
/ wonder if girls will want me with an old nose.
I can hear them now the heartless bitches!
"He's cute
but his nose is old."
Occasionally Brautigan fails, tumbling from his poetic perch, but the dare is worth every one of the falls.
THE BODY by Michael Benedikt. 77 pages. Wesleyan. $4.
Benedikt might be a cubist or surrealist painter, reconstructing the body, finding new relationships between lip and eye, discovering with insane logic that man's hair is the most important part of love. Raised in New York City, Benedikt is continually inspecting, distorting and re-creating the skyline of human existence. The method is often deliberately and delightfully nonsensical.
"The European Shoe," for example, might be considered a parody of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." The shoe, like the blackbird, incongruously becomes the focal point for all the varieties of life.
The European Shoe is constructed of grass and reed, bound up and wound around so that it may slip easily over the wearer's head.
The European Shoe spends summers in delightful ways. A lady feels its subtle and unexpected pressure the length of her decolletage. (It winters in pain.)
It helps an old lady, extremely crippled and arthritic, move an enormous cornerstone. It invents a watch, which, when wound up tightly, flies completely to pieces.
In all of Benedikt's poems, the body is somehow in a contest with the spirit, while fact struggles with fancy. The result is a verbal battlefield strewn with strange, barely recognizable victims of war, delighting in their own demise.
SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER by James Wright. 58 pages. Wesleyan. $4.
A remembrance of his uncle, dead in Ohio, the wayward life in Minneapolis, the cold loneliness of a man beside the river or hunched in a freight car—these are elements captured in James Wright's latest book of poems. As in his earlier works, the Midwest is the center of his poetic world.
My life was never so precious
To me as now.
I gape unbelieving at those two lines
Of my words, caught and frisked naked.
If they loomed secret and dim On the wall of the drunk-tank, Scraped there by a raw fingernail In the trickling crusts of gray mold,
Surely the plainest thug who read them Would cluck with ancient pity.
It is a tribute to the intensity of his vision that Wright's poetry—distilled to the essential, like Robert Frost's—does make the reader cluck with the ancient pity.
BREAKING CAMP by Marge Piercy. 74 pages. Wesleyan. $4.
Marge Piercy writes highly charged poems about death, sex, love and a wide range of other social experiences. Her perceptive eye can be tough and precise ("precinct house benches dark with the grease of fearful buttocks"). She can also be highly imaginative, portraying her husband, a mathematician, in deep thought:
You go fathoms down into abstraction where the pressure and the cold would
squeeze the juice from
my tissues.