POETS’ CORNER

Search Party

William Matthews

Houghton Mifflin: 314 pp., $26

*

The late Bill Matthews could recycle and serve up the sad and happy leftovers of life’s feast like so much ham-on-wry. His style was recognizably late-century hip, but it was also brooding and bitterly funny. He translated the Roman poet Martial: Those tart epigrams mirrored his natural terseness and elegance. He was a master of rapid contradictions and understated flamboyance. “Search Party” collects 165 poems from his 10 books as well as selections from his unpublished work from 1970 through a posthumous volume published in 1998. With very few exceptions, it is uncommonly engaging and trenchantly witty work.

Matthews found his “voice,” as we say, early -- in fact, he quickly grew into his one-for-the-road down-pat jazz:

But let’s say it:

evil exists, because choice does, and because

luck does and the rage that is luck’s wake.

He abandoned a first-book desultory surrealism -- which went (as American cornfed surrealism often does) exactly nowhere -- and began to fit his arrow to the bowstring: “As J. Paul Getty knew, the meek will / inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.” A typical Matthews riff would shimmy, clicking along tracks of a cool, musical logic:

when we took off, we liked the chill and lull

of 39,000 feet, for there we felt, I’m not sure

how to say this, somehow American. The law

seemed still a beautiful abstraction, and the land

we sped so far above was like the land we grew

up on, before malls and apartment

complexes were named for what had been destroyed

to build them: Fair Meadows Mall, Tall Oaks

townhouses. Trapped in the same experiment,

as ever, we turned to each other

our desperate American friendliness,

now our most spurned export ...

His mature belief that our best insights and emotions are wed within poetic expression allows us to see him as a standard-bearer of an instructive vernacular passion. We can learn a lot from what seems easy here but, as the jazzman says, ain’t.

*

Trouble in Mind

Lucie Brock-Broido

Alfred A. Knopf: 76 pp., $23

*

Lucie Brock-Broido’s third book, “Trouble in Mind,” is her best yet. This is a poet who cultivates elegant nerviness and a riveting poetic clairvoyance, daring the soul to push deeper and deeper into unwrit dimensions.

Hell is a world of its own, with its own

Towns and countryside. There I stayed beside your nearly

Warmblooded form like a brook mink in the clutch

Of a slightly larger animal and sat still, having

Spent a moment in someone else’s marrow,

A diaphanoscope, catastrophic as the good love

Of a teastained bride abroad in the rain

Of saxifrage and clover, tomorrowing.

These new poems are thresholds -- whatever material is used in construction burns itself up before the reader’s eyes in a gorgeous disjunction of syntax and history. We see the poems’ conception before us even as they change to metaphysical lyrics, and we enter a provisional world, a world on fire, disappearing but permanent in its imagery.

The poems are elegies for a lost friend; their grief is far beyond the usual antecedents of such injury:

When you delete a wing or limb

From a creature’s form, it will inevitably cry out against this

Taking, but in the end it will become grievously docile,

Shut: far gone old god, you have been plain.

Childhood is “gone like a phial of ether / Thrown on the fire -- just / A little jump of flame, like grief ...” Again and again, the mysterious components of grief provide the alchemical basis for these radiant forms of thought and longing. In “Trouble in Mind” we witness the imagination’s virtuosity -- in trouble, in loss, in shattering despair -- distilled in the alembic of this poet’s radical, brilliantly inventive diction.