Chasing poetry in the spring

April is the cruelest month for reviewers of poetry, as there is always a blossoming abundance of books spilling from publishers’ spring lists for National Poetry Month and beyond -- yet not enough print space to adequately address this abundance. With this surfeit in mind, I’ve tried to “blossom-herd” a bit of the April bouquet:

Ghost Girl

Amy Gerstler

Penguin: 68 pp., $16 paper

Amy GERSTLER is L.A.’s “ghost girl” poet. The stylistic variety and range of the voices flowing through her in her new book gives her a medium-like presence, an effect of effortless “channeling” -- but in fact this is a resourceful, gifted writer who is completely in control of her material, whether she is offering the Delphi oracle in a teenage girl’s voice or the deeply empathetic “A Widow”:

Since his death she sleeps with his old radio

pressed against her ear.... .

All through the appalling, shapeless night, emphatic

Voices prattle and buzz.

The poems “Miriam,” from the point of view of the sister of Moses; the sweetly surrealistic “In the Aspirin Orchard”; “Touring the Doll Hospital,” with its echoes of (and snippets from) Walt Whitman; “Witch Songs”; “The New Dog” -- all easily alternate rhetorical authority, from the Old Testament to a bright monologue by an unborn fetus. Like a woman with her ear pressed to an old radio, Gerstler takes in the energy of these invisible “waves” and reinvents them utterly as pretty astonishing poetry.

Baby B

Michael Ryan

Graywolf Press: 144 pp., $17

New & Selected Poems

Michael Ryan

Houghton Mifflin: 160 pp., $22

Michael Ryan has two new books -- one a kind of memoir-journal of the process of conceiving a child with the aid of fertility technology, the other a substantial book of poems, “New and Selected Poems.”

“Baby B” is not poetry but manages to accomplish what poetry aspires to: It makes the familiar new. Although women give birth every day, there is nothing simple or easily understood about either the body’s ability to reproduce or the revelatory process of bringing a baby to term. Ryan records, with humor, tenderness and precise attention to detail, the complexities of this experience. Most touching is his love for his wife and his abiding yearning for the baby-to-be, who remains a mystery yet is the most discussed, photographed and measured presence in the book. “Baby B” reads like a thriller, like the roll of the dice that is genetics. Nothing can be taken for granted in the miracle of human development -- except that the miracle baby will be just that.

“New and Selected Poems” remind us how much we have relied on this poet to forge a path for us in plain style: His much-praised “ear” and his sense of music and formal structure are unforgettably represented here as well as his notorious take-no-prisoners humor, though the book provides fewer “funny” poems than poems meant to chart a journey of the psyche. When we get to the new poems, we realize that we are in the presence of a vastly more compassionate and morally aware sensibility, the poems of a grown-up poet (if there is such a being):

as Chekhov put it, “compassion

down to your fingertips” --

looking on them as into the sun

not in the least for their sake

but slowly for your own

because it causes

the blinded soul to bloom ...

The Face

David St. John

HarperCollins: 64 pp., $24.95

“The FACE” represents a dramatic departure for David St. John from poems that revolved around their own center of gravity, gesturing at themselves and their languorous beauty. The poems in “The Face” turn away from that magnetic rhetorical center and disintegrate before our eyes, and the “self” of the poems slowly breaks apart:

I had come, it seemed, to the end of

my life --

Truly, something within me had

smashed like a stone wall

In any Italian hillside town,

collapsing as the lazy

earthquake ripples

Along its faults --

Still, there are hints, in this fluid verse-novella, of style-memory: “Those pieces of the self -- night after night -- shaken in the silver / Martini moonlight of insomnia” Lines like these flash along familiar gleaming thoroughfares of St. John imagery: The result is a shattered, ironic yet seductive and haunting sequence of poems, trying on faces in search of the poetic mask capable of staring down devastation.

The Long Meadow

Vijay Seshadri

Graywolf Press: 72 pp., $20

“Immediate CITY,” the first poem in Vijay Seshadri’s “The Long Meadow” is a beautiful, intricately rhyming and chiming poem:

Tall and plural and parallel,

Their buff, excited skins

of glass pressed to glass and steel

bronzed by the falling sun,

the city’s figmentary buildings dream

that they are one with the One.

Tonal pleasure is never a constant in poems -- Seshadri gives up a certain amount of music to confront what might be called Issues -- he is fearless in documenting the time in which he lives. Still, this “time” always includes the timeless fascination with language (the poem “Aphasia” distills this passion) and his warning is apt:

Don’t say I didn’t warn you about this.

Don’t say my concern for your welfare

Never extended to my sharing the terrible and

addictive secrets

That only death can undo.

This is a strong, almost reckless voice turning dark experience into an unrelenting sense of possibility. From the rhyming stanzas to a long prose meditation, the power of casual declamation holds sway.