Review by New York Times Review
ACCORDING to conventional wisdom, younger poets are engaged in "finding their voices" - a process often described in terms that make it seem like a cross between having an epiphany and having an aneurysm. For instance, here's Thom Gunn, in his elegy for Robert Duncan, detailing the emergence of Duncan's distinctive talent: When in his twenties a poetry's full strength Burst into voice as an unstopping flood, He let the divine prompting (come at length) Rushingly bear him any way it would. . . . Gunn is having a little fun in this portrait, true, but the idea he's playing with here is an oddly pervasive one. Many readers think of a poet's distinctive style as being "found," rather than, for example, "built." They suppose it arrives as "an unstopping flood," rather than in dribs and drabs and half measures. They believe it's a matter of, yes, inspiration. And in some ways, it is. But it also isn't. The achievement of a style is like the achievement of an individual poem writ large: it's a delicate balance of confidence and guesswork, as the writer simultaneously relies on what's worked in the past, bets on what might work right now and tries to leave a little room for things that might work in the future. It's like baking a pie with a recipe in one hand and a wish list in the other. Some poets manage the feat in their first books (Bishop), others take a couple of outings to get things right (Larkin) and still others pass through multiple styles over the courses of long careers (Yeats, Auden). The process is fascinatingly byzantine, but it's not really a matter of "divine prompting"; rather, a poet arrives at a style through the same combination of staggering labor and jolts of luck that most complex activities depend on. Which, of course, makes the eventual attainment no less impressive. Two recent books, Matthew Zapruder's COME ON ALL YOU GHOSTS (Copper Canyon, paper, $16) and Rachel Wetzsteon's SILVER ROSES (Karen & Michael Brazlller/Persea, paper, $16.50), help demonstrate the point. Zapruder, who is 43 and an editor at Wave Books, has been a fixture in the poetry world since the publication of his first collection, "American Linden," in 2002. From the beginning, he's worked in the tradition that extends from Auden through John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and (particularly) James Schuyler - a mode that will be overwhelmingly familiar to anyone who's spent much time with literary journals since the mid-1990s. The contemporary incarnation of this style is broad and loose, but generally speaking, it values gesture over statement; favors mixed diction and shifting tones; shuns traditional form; often involves dreams, collage and touches of surrealism; and inclines toward moods of whimsy, melancholy or mild happiness rather than fury, ecstasy or despair. It's no surprise to see titles like "Warning: Sad"; or to find opening lines like "Often I have an idea and say it immediately"; or conclusions like "I came up to tell you / I have never seen /such beautiful scissors." At its best, this approach can be delicately moving; at its worst, it can be precious and sentimental: the indie rock of the indiest art. The work in "Come On All You Ghosts," however, is the strongest of Zapruder's career. Many of the poems in this collection have a stillness and confidence that he hasn't managed with such consistency in the past. Consider the beginning of "Pocket": I like the word pocket. It sounds a little safely dangerous. Like knowing you once bought a headlamp in case the lights go out in a catastrophe. You will put it on your head and your hands will still be free. It's a standard Zapruder opening - charming, daffy, smartly put together (notice the internal rhyming of "dangerous" with "knowing you once" and "catastrophe" with "still be free"). And it's followed by some standard Zapruder meandering ("Look out scientists! Today the unemployment rate / is 9.4%"). But the poem's conclusion shifts into a different register: . . . And now I am looking away and thinking for the last time about my pocket. But this time I am thinking about its darkness. Like the bottom of the sea. But without the blind fluorescent creatures floating in a circle around the black box which along with tremendous thunder and huge shards of metal from the airplane sank down and settled here where it rests, cheerfully beeping. The poem plays, consciously or not, on Bishop's famous conclusion to "The Bight": "All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful." And it has an accordingly greater sense of risk: what Zapruder is coming up against here is the knowledge not just of death and loss, but of the banality ("cheerfully beeping") of both. Few artists are fazed by the possibility of seeming cryptic, but the list of poets willing to dare banality is short. Yet that risk must sometimes be run in order to capture experiences that are simultaneously conventional and brutal like the loss of a parent (which Zapruder handles gracefully in "They" and "Schwinn") or the paradoxes of desire (deftly sketched in "Frankenstein Love"). There are, of course, a few poems in "Come On All You Ghosts" that don't come off ("Letter to a Lover" is adorable, which is to say, annoying), and the book's admirably ambitious closing sequence, which gives the book its title, is sometimes a little too ardent for its own good. But these are exactly the chances Zapruder should be taking, as he moves from channeling a tradition into shaping it. RACHEL WETZSTEON killed herself at age 42 in December 2009. Like Zapruder, Wetzsteon was a well-known figure in the poetry world - she was the poetry editor for The New Republic and a past winner of the National Poetry Series, among other medals and gold-star stickers. And like Zapruder's, her style owes a great deal to Auden, in particular to the side of Auden fascinated with the desires and fears of childhood. But where Zapruder's finest writing has a child's steady, accepting gaze, Wetzsteon's work draws on childhood's extremity, its joys and rages. She is sustained not by Auden's warmth but by his wit and speed. In this, she follows yet another strand in American poetry, the debonair school that has James Merrill as a presiding figure, and whose practitioners like their poems formal, urban, scrupulously intelligent and chockablock with art (Wetzsteon's title, "Silver Roses," is a reference to Strauss's opera "Der Rosenkavalier"). This collection is uneven, but its best work consolidates the gains Wetzsteon made in her signature book, "Sakura Park." Wetzsteon is the kind of poet who invariably gets called a "flaneuse" - even by herself, in "Halt!" - probably because she writes about Manhattan in a Dorothy Parker sort of way, if Dorothy Parker had gone to Yale, As you might expect, she's a skilled band at verse that is, if not light, certainly light-ish, as in "Freely From Wyatt": I have become the forlorn type who buys almond biscotti for a long night in, glumly recapturing a sense of sin through stomach-aches. It hath been otherwise. This is fine and droll, sure, but her strongest writing takes on richer tones. Its sorrow isn't gray, but black; and its pleasure is sun yellow. Here is "Gold Leaves": Someone ought to write about (I thought and therefore do) stage three of alchemy: not inauspicious metal turned into a gilded page, but that same page turned back to basics when you step outside for air and feel a radiance that was not there the day before, your sidewalks lined with gold. The challenge for Wetzsteon, always, is to let wit enhance the poem, rather than retreating into wit before the poem really starts. It's a challenge she backs away from in some of the lesser poems in "Silver Roses" (a sequence pairing 17th-century poets with classic Hollywood directors is the poetic equivalent of a chef who makes puns on a dish's name, rather than cooking actual food). But in work like "New Journal," "Ruins," "Algonquin Afterthoughts" (the kind of light verse that isn't so light) and "The Menaced Objects Series" (an elegant play on Edward Gorey), Wetzsteon was writing at the top of her incandescent style. It's far more man a pity that the room has gone dark.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 24, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Zapruder's poems are ordered by dream logic that melds the familiar with the mysterious. Yet as brain-teasing as his wonderfully strange yet exactly right imagery is, the formal elements of his poems are so liquid and magnetizing as to be invisible. A poet of both respect and resistance, Zapruder has a penchant for disarming opening lines, such as, I hate the phrase inner life,' or, I like the word pocket. The latter launches a poem in which contemplation of a pocket how peculiar and gravid the word becomes with repetition leads to a vision of a wrecked airplane at the bottom of the sea. Zapruder writes with compassion and bafflement about loneliness and the broadcasting of war and other catastrophes, and he remembers his dead with candor and tenderness. Zapruder also ponders the unnerving juxtapositions of our world of earbuds, sad crushed plastic, and giant particle colliders. Of abundance and impoverishment, relentless connectivity and isolation in plain sight. I am never / at ease. I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. I examine my feelings without feeling anything. And yet these are deeply felt, exciting, and caring poems, droll and wistful, obliquely affirming, phosphorescently beautiful.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Zapruder's third collection of hip, quirkily haunting yet surprisingly earnest poems is his best and most beautiful. He spans the major genres-love poetry ("I admire/ and fear you, to me you are an abyss/ I cross towards you"), elegy ("I have been coasting,/ but from this [moment] forward Grace I vow/ I shall coast no more"), ode ("my friends ordered square burgers/ with mysterious holes leaking a delicious substance"), friendship tribute ("Dobby lives/ in Minnesota and seems basically happy"), to name a few-updating them for the 21st century. He even proves himself to be a charming nature poet: of a fox he says, "it held a grasshopper in its mouth,/ which it dropped when it saw the small carcass of a young javelina." These poems are still full of quick jump-cuts, seeming tangents, and almost adorable imagery, but all more focused on subject matter. In the spooky but also companionable titular long poem that closes the volume, Zapruder communes with an array of unseen presences, from the reader to the shades of his family and influences: "Come with me/ and I will show you/ terrible marvels.// The little cough I heard in my mind/ was one I remembered/ my father made just as he died." (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
As in his previous collection (The Pajamaist), Zapruder speaks "with a voice that pretends to be shy/ and actually is, always in search of the question/ that might make you ask me one in return." In his now signature, meandering style, he'll often begin with simple, even childlike observations ("Oh this Diet Coke is really good") that set off associative chains in search of subjects that resonate, psychologically or philosophically, with past personal experiences. A poem that begins, for example, with dishwashing triggers a meditation on childhood encounters with Ursulines. Seeming to discover themselves as they go, Zapruder's improvisations (or so they appear) enlist the reader as coexplorer, stumbling into candid self-revelations ("I am also/ always balancing/ on the smooth blade of not/ letting other people down") or surreal quips ("I feel like an elk getting a pelvic exam") with wide-eyed grace. Only when, as in the long title poem, the poet attempts a sustained elegiac or solemn tone do his energy and inventiveness flag. VERDICT Affably offbeat interiority is nothing new (think New York School), but Zapruder brings a charm and rhetorical skill that infuse this familiar poetic posture with new-and enjoyably readable-life.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
