The Rumpus conducted a stunning review of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s WATER & SALT, her debut collection of moving and powerful poetry.

“Tuffaha harnesses the legerdemain of lyric to link love and grief, anger and hope,” reviewer Jenna Le writes. “Her poetry is a timely reminder that we should not let ourselves be lulled into complacency by the rhythms of the everyday, that each and every one of us readers is part of a bigger, more complex, multilingual, interconnected whole.”

Click here to read the full article, which includes insightful analysis of a few of Tuffaha’s most moving pieces.

Philip Gross, winner of the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize, reviewed Andrea Scarpino’s Once, Then for the UK journal, The North. Gross discusses the poetry saying that “the subject sounds depressing, the effect of reading these taut, poised tactful poems is quite the opposite. They are never impersonal, but always inhabited by a speaker, and always directly or implicitly addressed.”

Carnal Fragrance Florence Weinberger. Red Hen (CDC, dist.), $12.95 (72p) ISBN 1-888996-95-1

In this blunt, book-length meditation on her husband’s death from metastatic melanoma, Florence Weinberger rips the morphine drip of poetry from her reader’s arm. These poems are powered by a savage, penetrating intelligence. Penetrating because it exhumes buried stratigraphies of feeling and motivation. Savage because it is the instrument with which she punishes herself for failures as wife and lover.

She writes, “I documented everything that took its emotional toll on both of us, the reaction to the diagnosis, the course of treatment, including several hospital stays, and how our relationship was affected.” Death, of course, does not end a relationship. It is the ultimate estrangement and precludes any reconciliation. Anything that was left unsaid, any lingering, half-remembered, misremembered injury or offense remains unresolved, growing and intensifying with the length of time since the partner’s death.

These poems are plain spoken, plain as a slap in the face. Yet even the simplest language becomes an opportunity for insight. In the description of her husband’s cancer protocol (“A treatment every four weeks….The twisted wreckage of the sweet word treat” (19)) we notice the stiletto pun and mordantly reverberating rhyme.

The outrage embodied in that last phrase fuels and strengthens her. In the poem “My Tenderness,” for instance, she observes that “my sorrow turned to muscle // while I lift him to his feet, / my voice ordinary, as if it is ordinary / to die accompanied by tenderness” (26).

This tenderness is complicated by a recognition of her husband’s wounded nature. A survivor of the Nazi death camps, he found it almost impossible to enjoy life’s small pleasures. “He held fast to everything, wore some clothes / threadbare, saved the favorites / by scant use.” His inability to simply enjoy life seems to have been a frequent source of tension in their relationship. His stiffness is mirrored in her unwillingness to give the unworn “favorites” away, holding onto them “as if they waited only his return / and if he came back, they’d urge him / to put them on, enjoy the wanton pleasure / of their feel against his skin, / teach him what he could not learn before” (50).

His failings, and hers, are ineradicable. Thus, guilt is never far from her consciousness. A self-lacerating note is struck early and often as if the speaker, wounded by history, cannot trust life.

Friends were falling all around us.

I felt lucky, untouched, puzzled how it skipped around

us….

as if we lived on a street in Bosnia

where every wall had bullet holes and every

doorstep except ours was stained with blood.

(18)

As the rest of the book testifies, this is just a temporary Passover. Like everyone else, they are marked for suffering.

Yet when suffering comes, and death, the speaker tries, with characteristic ambivalence, to maintain her grip on what was positive in her marriage. In “Pasting Stamps on Envelopes,” for instance, she offers friends and relatives:

Grim thanks,…

I love you all

for telling me

how much you loved him,

how pure his soul,

how open his hands.

You serve

to remind me

what was lost.

(40)

The extremity of her pain is suggested in the simple act of removing her wedding ring: “Months later, when I was twisting the ring off my finger, / my finger became engorged like a sausage, / it turned crimson with outrage. I thought / it would pop off. I stopped / breathing” (55). The sexual charge of the imagery is exceptional, as is the doubled, rhymed suggestion (“pop off” / “stop breathing”) that in removing the ring, she herself is dying.

These poems function as “a dream of what you burned into me” (68), physical tenderness, sexual intimacy. “It is a dream of a man who yearns to be touched again / lying still in the skin of a woman who wants desperately to touch him” (68). Loss is impalpable, intangible, precisely what cannot be touched; yet she touches it whenever she touches her own body. She has discovered an irrefutable paradox. And paradox is the only language for what has disappeared but is everywhere: “death plants for eternity the seed of silence” (65).

And yet as we all must, the speaker nears acceptance even as she asymptotically veers from it. In a poem about a trip to the beach, she addresses her dead husband, “This is what I came here to do: / To purify with waves of salt water the stinging assaults of memory. / And like you, to move on” (64). The churn and hiss of the ocean becomes an aural analogue for memory.

Memory is all she has, and in her effort to reconstruct the man she loved, she discovers not only the impossibility of her task but also her own implacable selfishness. With his death, the fragments of memory which constitute the man begin to flee her control. “You are being deconstructed down to letters and spaces like the original Torah / to be flung out among the multitudes like pieces of bread” (42). Despite the sacramental nature of the bread (the communion wafer), it is a disturbing image. She returns to the notion of fragments again at the end of the poem. “I ask angels to bless my hands / while I gather your facets like shards from a broken vessel.” We are reminded of contemporary Israel where after suicide bombings religious rescue workers gather body parts in accordance with Jewish Law.

Finally, despite her best efforts, she admits she has failed. Without the distraction of the living man, she can begin to see what it was she really loved, a matrix of dream and wish-fulfillment. The real man goes missing. The poems themselves are fragmentary products of a fractured consciousness: “These pieces of anguish are unpatterned / and appear suddenly,” she admits. “They do not add up. / Death remains a philosophy and religion” (54). What a strange assertion! His death is all she has. And in devoting herself to Death, by professing Death above all else, she is somehow saved. “In my denial,” her denial of ordinary life, of life without her husband, she tells us that, “I feel infinitely healthy” (54).

— Lee Rossi

Pope Brock shares an excerpt from his newest release, ANOTHER FINE MESS, on Nautilus in an article titled “The Moon is Full of Money”

Read the full article here.

Pope Brock is a writer, teacher and DJ living in Arlington, Massachusetts. He is the author of three books: Indiana Gothic (Doubleday/Nan A. Talese), about the murder of his great-grandfather; Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam (Crown), about the most successful quack in American history, and Another Fine Mess: Life on Tomorrow’s Moon, a work of what might be called speculative nonfiction. His articles have appeared in GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone, London Sunday Times Magazine, and many other publications. Since 2005 he has taught in the low-residency MFA Writing Program at the University of Nebraska.

Amplified Dog Charles Harper Webb. Red Hen (CDC, dist.), $15.95 (96p) ISBN 978-1-59709-022-3

In the title poem of Charles Harper Webb’s sixth book of poems, Amplified Dog, a dog barking into a microphone in a California suburb is as close as the residents may ever get to the howl of a wolf laying claim to his territory. The man who sets the dog at the mic thinks the territory is heartache and the bark a call to bring his woman back, but the dog, who knows his human as “. . . stupid and sad, just like a man,” woofs his appraisal of the causes of heartache in contemporary life: “. . . Woof! You work too much, / and don’t enjoy enough. . . /. . .Woof! Even sex is work for you.” That the wild is electrified is not surprising given the poet’s fifteen year turn as a rock guitarist. He knows that in the buzz and bling of consumer culture, the unrelenting noise of it, the wild could not get a yawp in edgewise were it not amplified. But amplification is not enough; someone must hear it. With a growl the poem’s speaker responds, “I’m here. I’m listening.”

Who is this speaker? A Whitman man who can hear the wild, who can take a yawp as well as he can give it, a guy known to “kick-box four times a week, lift weights, hunt, fish, and (not) take guff,” who, nonetheless, worries that his “. . . sperm counts are falling.” (“Sperm Counts Are Falling”). The “here” that he has aged into is the shift from rock and roll to householding: a life of wife, son, and taking out the trash. In Webb’s poems, the world of husband and father is not narrow. In the first section of the book, desire, hilarity, anger, and loss are sidekicks in poems whose titles reveal a consciousness that unabashedly leans into quandaries it cannot solve: “Prayer to Tear the Sperm-Dam Down,” “Cyclops,” “My Son is Called ‘Developmentally Delayed,'” “Consider How the Toilet Overflows,” and “The Animals are Leaving,” the last a poignant catalogue that bids farewell to extinct species.

In many of the poems, the overriding style of speech is an idiocyncratic mingling of rough-and-tumble diction, sharp-edged observation, and full-throttle engagement with a weird assortment of subjects, a brilliant fortissimo of voice and form in which clearly delineated rhythm and vivid internal rhyme draw the meaning and the reader through the poem. Once entered, there is no turning back. This is Webb’s signature style, and, while it is compelling, especially in a single poem, when encountered repeatedly, it can feel less like engagement and more like entrapment.

The trap is sprung by the collection’s skillful sequencing; its fortissimo is modulated by poems that turn away from linguistic swagger and formal deering-do toward a tone of tender bafflement and a style of thought that admits uncertainty, instability, or blurred perception. The language of poetry is, as the Brazilian poet Joao Cabral de Melo Neto has written, a knife all blade (“Uma Faca so Lamina”) in which the knife wounds the one who wields it, poetry exacting an opening of self. This is the action of the more modulated poems. One of them, “A Meal Not Eaten,” begins with a comic pastiche of Chinese take-out and ends with a morphing image that questions what is real, the speaker in a bed “in which I can almost touch her, / asleep beside me as my wife, / though she is not, and hasn’t been / for a long time.”

The two concluding poems also destabilize expectations. “The End,” a riff on endings that dazzles like the fireworks finale of a rock concert, is followed by “In the Beginning was the Word,” an invocation to the generative power of language in which the son bursts into the clarity of speech: “CAT,” “SOCKS,” “SHOES,” “DA-DA.” Like a tape loop, it sends the reader back to the primal call of the initial poem whose clear “Woof!” set the argument of the book in motion. By linking in multiple ways to the beginning, the final poems make clear that what language has claimed is the territory of the domesticated dog who has preserved his wildness enough to bark the raw, disturbing truth.– J.C. Todd

The sonnet is an enduring lyric monument, one of the few postclassical forms that refuses to die. Almost every major poet writing in a Western language has attempted to stand upon “its scanty plot of ground,” and this “little song,” with its fixed formal patterns, has continued to cross boundaries of style, nationality, race, language, and politics. Indeed, it’s difficult not to be captured by the gravitational pull of the sonnet. The form, in all of its variations, has proven inexhaustible, allowing for permutations in syntax, rhyme, stress, and subject, a veritable playroom for poets to explore and experiment.

As Phillis Levin notes in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, “It thrives because it offers a haven for complex emotions and memories, an innate holding pattern and stopping point, a guarantee that however dangerous or overwhelming the subject, the duration of the encounter will be brief. Because the temporal frame is set in advance, the material, however difficult, is free to surface—an image whose meaning begins to unfold as time draws to a close.

“It is this very “temporal frame” of the sonnet, and the tempus fugit theme so often explored, that engages Ernest Hilbert in his debut book Sixty Sonnets. Time, history, death, are on Hilbert’s mind throughout the collection, as in “Genealogies,” in which he wonders “What strange folk” preceded him, and “What turnpikes of genealogy sped / My kin through ages and nations to me?” Hilbert’s poems are at once individual, yet combine to form a whole, like minutes in an hour. Their brevity speaks to our sound-bite, e-commerce age, yet they cannot be so easily glossed over like so much news reportage.

From the perspective of an intriguing mishmash of subjects, Hilbert often takes on the persona of the failed, the beat up, and the beaten down, in which all are “sinking on a soft black balloon.” Peopled with thieves and fugitives, retired boxers and retired literary critics, those who are “washed out / And glazed over,” Hilbert entreats his hapless heroes to “go on, get high,” though there is always a price to be paid. However, Hilbert is able to poke fun at himself and does not exclude himself from their company. In “A Few Drinks and We’re All Poets,” Hilbert begins, “We’ll head out, you and me, have a pint, or / Maybe three.” The sensibility is Eliot’s, to be sure, a contemporary Prufrock. Hilbert ends his brief love song, “What else to say of our faint star-fall town, / But we’ve sunk so low, we might as well drown.

“Hilbert writes in less than “strict energic measures,” and prefers the Shakespearean pattern of the form, with its whip-snapping epigrammatic final two lines, and he often avoids perfect rhymes until the ending couplet. Hilbert plays loosely with the form, with lines varying in syllable length and stress pattern, but retains the sonnet’s architectural profile. As he says in “Cautionary Tale; or, What Goes Up Must Come Down,” “You can only get away with so much.” It is the very stricture of the form that creates the tension between formal structure and colloquial rhythm. In poems like “Domestic Situation,” he begins in a provocative, storytelling manner:

Maybe you’ve heard about this. Maybe not.

A man came home and chucked his girlfriend’s cat

In the wood chipper. This really happened.

Dinner wasn’t ready on time. A lot

Of other little things went wrong. He spat

On her father, who came out when he learned

About it. He also broke her pinky,

Stole her checks, and got her sister pregnant.

But she stood by him, stood strong, through it all,

Because she loved him. She loved him, you see.

She actually said that, and then she went

And married him. She felt some unique call.

Don’t try to understand what another

Person means by love. Don’t even bother.

This is something one may hear on the local news or “Jerry Springer.” However, Hilbert’s use of this classic form contrasts with the brutality of the subject, elevating it beyond such coarse voyeurism as is viewed on such programming. In “Domestic Situation,” Hilbert has varied the Shakespearian rhyme scheme — abcabcdefdefgg — which subtly breaks the poem into tercets rather than quatrains. The shift, or volta, of the poem occurs as it traditionally does after the eighth line, and his couplet acts as commentary. All fourteen lines are ten syllables, and the stresses vary between four and five per line.

Though some musicality pervades these poems, I would not characterize them as lyrical or melodious, in the vein of a Shakespeare—”I all alone beweep my outcast state”—or Keats—”When I have fears that I may cease to be.” Hilbert writes with spare language, in colloquial prose rhythms with irregular stress patterns, yet he is able to maintain deft control through the use of mostly decasyllabic lines and off-rhymes. Perhaps Hilbert’s lines reflect our own precarious hold on the world, where we are always close to losing control.

Writing in the sonnet form connects Hilbert to those who have practiced it before him, so that in a simple word or phrase he is able to allude to both contemporary and past subjects. Who could read “A Sad Last Number for the Gentlemen at the Tavern” without conjuring images of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jonson and Donne, at the Mermaid Tavern? In “The King Issues His Annual Report,” what at first appears as an antiquated poem is wittily modernized as Hilbert compares a king’s conquering of the world with Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron, whose “works stun / The world, and it’s all so much goddamned fun.”

Hilbert’s themes are reminiscent of, among many others, William Drummond of Hawthornden, who begins one of his sonnets,”I know that all beneath the moon decays, / And what by mortals in this world is brought, / In Time’s great periods shall return to nought.” Yet Hilbert contemporizes this timeless idea with “day sinks into magnifying dark” and “You will never win.”

Of course, many of Hilbert’s allusions extend beyond the sonnet and its practitioners. In “Poem Begun on the Autumn Equinox,” Hilbert begins:

The graveyard is as orderly and clean

As the playing fields and ballpark nearby.

I park the jeep midway between the two.

By the use of the word “midway,” situating himself between the ballpark and the graveyard, between youth and death, the reader cannot help but remember Dante’s first line in The Inferno: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” The allusion is continued as Hilbert says a few lines down, “At thirty-five I’m at least half way through,” just as Dante was midway on his life’s journey when he began his allegorical trip to hell, though Hilbert’s version is more indicative of modern ennui, of the drudgery of daily existence, and is a brief reflection on death’s slow approach.

Hilbert is at once ironic, dark, and witty, and these attributes are on display in this fine poem, “Calavera for a Friend”:

Calavera for a Friend

Dia de los Muertos

When your heart is scorched out, the unruly world

Will seal around you as a dark ocean

Behind a ship at dusk—the wake will fade

And spread wider, until fully unfurled.

Love reserved for you will slacken.

Your portion

Of commerce ends with the last deal you made.

A stranger will take your job, buy your home,

Maybe wear your shirts and shoes, and the books

You cherished will be thumbed by new readers.

Young tourists will roam everywhere you roamed.

Some small items might remain, artifacts,

Footnotes, fingerprints, cuff links, little anchors,

Small burrs that cling: initials carved in a tree,

Your name inscribed where no one will see.

The friend in this poem may very well be Hilbert himself, and the poem serves as a humorous reminder of the slippery nature of existence. The calavera is the perfect form for this, as it is an amusing style of poetry written for the Mexican holiday the Day of the Dead and humorously criticizes the living, or acts as a satirical obituary for the dead, a way of joking in the face of death.

Even as his poems act as “little anchors” or “initials carved in a tree,” the small artifacts of one’s life that might remain, Hilbert observes that our life’s endeavors will more likely be overtaken and overshadowed to the point of being oblivious to the world. Yet just as Drummond knows “all beneath the moon decays,” he nevertheless concludes his sonnet, “I both must write and love.” So, too, Hilbert writes, and hopefully, his poems will be one of those burrs that cling.

“The poem mingles aural and visual music: The caesurae [unable to be reproduced here] audibly create rhythm, while visually recalling the fragments of the fractal that are repeatedly broken down into tinier fragments. Later, the viewer encounters a story within a story, which is another fractal aspect, as well as circular imagery (halos, reverberations, bends of backs and notes, spotlights, clusters), light (spotlights, halos, dust motes in track lighting), upward movement (buoyancy like wood, plucked up, bounce of the horsehair bow, lifting of leaves, swirling, fluttering). Throughout, Green has entwined the images that play so well off each other in various associations into beautiful, lingering poignancy.”

–Jeannine M. Lesinski, Newpages.com

To read Lyn Lifshin’s, Persephone, is to be energized by a flow of poems which catapult through the book’s 181 pages. Prophetically, none of her poems ends with a period so our natural instinct is to read non-stop, absorbing the cumulative effect. Her subject matter ranges from self discovery, love, motherhood, women and poems of place and important events. Although the topics appear diverse, there is a natural, almost urgent flow from one poem to the next.

In Section I, Autobiography, she writes about the ephemeral self: “if I tell you/how bruised she got you’ll/ probably think she’s me.” In another poem, “a woman goes into darkness/… … ..You probably think it could be me.” None-the-less the persona of this poet comes out loud and clear as a woman of intensity, passion and sensitivity, ready to face all the ironies of the human condition.

The poems move effortlessly on to the Section on love where the term, black roses, contrasts the dark side of love with its sensuality such as “skin touching skin.” In The Affair, which portrays an on-line romance, she says, “I wanted his body glued to mine/Distance kept the electricity vivid. /It was a dangerous tango. / How could I know his mother leaped into Niagara Falls. /How could I know he was ice.”

Shanan Ballam, writing for New Letters Magazine, gives high praise to William Trowbridge’s Put This On Please.

“Trowbridge’s technical and emotional gifts create a bond of trust with readers, making us want to move with him and bear witness, as he exposes our human desires for fame, recognition, acceptance, and love.”

Read the complete review here.

Westechester Magazine writes about Jim Tilley, dubbed “The Poet of Wall Street,” and his new book of poetry, In Confidence, published by Red Hen Press.

Thanks to Anna Call from Foreword for the great review of Florencia Ramirez’s EAT LESS WATER, calling it “a charming work that gets its point across beautifully.”

“Greene has come through an extraordinary trial both at home and abroad advocating for Peter. She is clear-eyed about the fact that both of her Russian-born children face unusual challenges, and she’s ready to accept and love them as they are, not as she dreamed they would be.”

– Christina Gombar

Read the full review of “When Rain Hurts” by Literary Mama here.

In the lead-up to the 2011 Tucson Book Festival, Jarret Keene published this review of Cynthia Hogue’s Or Consequence–in the Tucson Weekly (10 March 2011).

Sixty Sonnets, Reviewed by Maryann Corbett

One look at the cover of Sixty Sonnets lets you know you’re dealing with a poet who’s got both slyness and chutzpah—at least if poet Ernest Hilbert and cover designer Jennifer Mercer worked closely together, and the acknowledgments suggest that they did. The cover design parodies the staid, pale dignity of a classical music score like the ones published by G. Schirmer and Boosey & Hawkes—the color, the placement of the graphics and rules, the typefaces, even the fake opus numbers. To that pattern the designer adds a splat of tea stain, a trompe-lâ’oeil ripped corner, and what looks like the print of a drippy wineglass. The seriousness of real art, and the grit and mess of real living. It’s a fair, and clever, representation of the book, and it was a smart move to turn it into the publicity stickers that the Baroque in Hackney blog tells us about. While we’re considering the looks of the book—something we should do while we still have the privilege of reading real books—we should also applaud page designer Sydney Nichols and note that 6-by-8 inch pages consisting of fourteen lines of Bembo set 10 on 18 are lovely to behold.

But you are reading this to learn about the poetry, and the first bit of poetry to be assessed is the title itself. The plain words Sixty Sonnets are a complicated sort of claim. One can’t ignore the likeness in sound to the TV program title “Sixty Minutes,” and the suggestion of an assortment of news stories. The word Sonnets by itself tells us that Hilbert means to engage with the tradition. “Engage” means both to gather in, as a speaker does to listeners, and to square off against, as an army does to enemy forces. The tradition with which he means to engage goes back to the Italian “little song” and comes in assorted classical forms, and is shaped (usually) in fourteen lines, most often iambic, and has a very definite sort of argument and structure, right down to the placement of its prescribed change of direction. Sixty Sonnets, with no other embellishment or limitation, tells us that this will not be a thematically unified collection like Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets, or Tony Barnstone’s Sad Jazz: Sonnets, or Kim Bridgford’s To the Extreme (about world records), or Philip Dacey’s New York Postcard Sonnets, or Moira Egan’s Bar Napkin Sonnets. We know we’re going to get a unity of form but also a variety of theme and subject matter. What we’ll want to see is how inventive, how various, how insightful, and how wise the poet can be within those limits.

Those limits need not have been very tight, given the broad understanding of the modern sonnet. (See Tony Barnstone’s article in the December 2006 issue of The Cortland Review.) In fact, Hilbert has made the limits tight in a new way. He’s created his own Houdini-like set of chains to wriggle out of: a new form that’s already known as the Hilbertian sonnet, with the rhyme scheme abc abc def def gg. It’s a form designed to grate against the expectations of the reader who is geared to the usual foursquare quatrains in the octaves of the Petrarchan and Shakespearian sonnet forms. It also cuts across the squared grain of some of the poet’s arguments, as it does here in “Fortunate Ones,” where we have couplets of thought and tercets of rhyme:

You will inherit large sums of money

(But someone dear to you will have to die first).

You will travel far and see the wide world

(And load yourself with debt; these things aren’t free).

You can relax now. You’ve been through the worst.

(But it consumed your youth, and now you’re old.)

Bucking our expectation of quatrains is a way of allowing rhyme to be present but not foregrounded. Even for a master and great proponent of form as Hilbert, that strategy might be necessary in the current climate of smiling intolerance for rhyme. (Gentle reader, please do not try to tell me this prejudice is easing. Not ten days ago I went to a reading at which Todd Boss, whose new book Yellowrocket is getting terrific press, made the baldfaced claim that end rhyme is “not cool,” while internal rhyme is much better accepted.) Bucking our expectation of rhyme is also simply a way of keeping readers off balance, keeping them un-lulled by regularity of sonics. As to the location of the volta, or turn, again we don’t know what to expect; the novel form upsets our habit of looking for a turn after the octave. Sometimes there is one, sometimes it’s elsewhere, sometimes it’s absent. Hilbert bucks our metrical expectations too: he writes mostly ten-syllable lines, but refuses to let too many of them fall into the expected iambic pattern. No amount of looseness or “breathability” will make them iambic; it’s not in their design to let us settle into a pattern.

Nothing here settles. The opening poem goes right for the gut with vividness, drama, and crunchy consonants—

On a step behind the Holiday Inn,

Two Russians roamed up, bummed a cigarette,

While a third snuck up, struck me from behind.

I sprawled to asphalt. Then the boot came in.

I swung through the red, but it’s a good bet

I didn’t land one. The blackout was kind.

and the second poem seems to follow on the same action. These dramatic or thematic pairs are scattered throughout the book and are distinguished by strong use of sound; two poems about Thomas Eakins in the book’s final section are remarkable for their density of sound devices as well as their striking visual qualities, such as the description of the motion of a rowing scull with its oars as a “delicate insect thrash.” Another such pair in the first section, about fugitives fleeing a robbery, exerts a grip on the brain that reminds me of the work of Michael Donaghy. But it might not be wise to specify likenesses; the sixty poems are different enough that they’ll evoke comparisons with many other poets.

The poems that use language strikingly tend to be my favorites in this book. But the title promises us variety within limits, and variety is what we get. There are also poems that strike us by the range of the characters being depicted among them: scholars and losers and entrenched suburbanites and figures of myth and history. Other poems are striking in their thoughtfulness and depth of feeling. The favorites I mentioned, besides having attention-grabbing sonics, also seem to represent the poet himself, in his own real feelings, and not a fictional narrator. Examples include the poem addressed “To a godson” and the one titled “Love Poem,” which pulls every love-poem-sucker chain in my head every bit as successfully as does “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

“A piece entitled “Song” seems to be a personal ars poetica:

A song for those who learn forgotten, slow

Skills, crafts submerged long past by massed commerce,

The last, noble pull of old ways restored,

Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.

The poet-critic Adam Kirsch, with his pessimistic view of almost everything modern, singles out that last couplet for special attention in The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry. The admiration in those lines for “old ways,” slow methods, and craft is probably what prompts Kirsch to declare Hilbert one of the best poets writing today. The flip side of that admiration for craft—disdain for a modern lack of discipline, plain amazement at what passes for modern life—shows up in other poems in starker, flatter language:

Maybe you’ve heard about this, maybe not.

A man came home and chucked his girlfriend’s cat

Into the wood chipper. This really happened.

The section of the book entitled “Legendary Misbehavior,” the longest section in the book, is the section built on these plain, flattish, wry observations of human ineptness and general propensity to screw up. This segment seems to be garnering the most attention in the online world. Perhaps that’s because its title has also been given to the poet’s spoken-word recording. But perhaps it’s also because in it Hilbert, for all his disapproval, finds in these poems a way to be warmly sympathetic toward “all the aging fuck-ups/The guys who can’t get their shit in one bag . . .” (It seems this is as close as the modern sonnet gets to the classical poems of remorse, like “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action.”) This wry but affectionate take on life may be Hilbert at his most authentic, in spite of his Oxford doctorate, his editorship of Contemporary Poetry Review, and his work as an antiquarian book dealer. The hints of this are scattered all over the book as small, clever pleasures, like the one-liners tucked into the copyright and acknowledgments pages.

For my money, I would have preferred a few more of the thrillingly sonic, the dramatic, the vivid, and the wise pieces, and fewer of the crisply flat ones. Flatness, even by design, even when chosen and skillfully deployed for shock value, is still, well, flatness. And there is rather more of it in the book than there is of the other styles. If the book’s balance isn’t perfect, though, it still delivers the full range of human types and stories, and nearly the whole breadth of what the sonnet can do. Of the great, classic sonnet themes, there’s only one that’s conspicuously absent from this grouping: the face-off with God.

God doesn’t figure here as Other, either as an object of devotion or one of paralyzing doubt. There’s no “Batter my heart,” and there are no “terrible sonnets.” But here’s where the sympathetic stance of the “misbehavior” section figures: we might see Hilbert as being God in these poems—as taking the all-gathering view of the merciful God who has room for all these lost ones, right along with the desperate fugitives, retired literary critics, crime victims, lovers, and godfathers. The poet as indwelling creator spirit? It fits for Hilbert: poet, from poietes, maker.