POETS’ CORNER

Over the last few years, I’ve been fortunate to serve as columnist for Poets’ Corner, a monthly space generously provided by the Book Review and its editors. Their commitment to poetry has made it possible for me to comment on contemporary verse and acquire a sense of its varied readership. I am taking a yearlong leave of absence at this time, but Poets’ Corner will continue. I’d like to thank Book Review and this column’s readers for their thoughtful attention, feedback and support.

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Red Shoes

Honor Moore

W.W. Norton: 90 pp., $23.95

These poems are so charged with sexual heat and erotic suppleness that even the revered avuncular symbolist Wallace Stevens comes off (in an eponymous poem) as a burnished biker:

... His white tee shirt

was snug over robust chest

and belly, his golden hair

long, his beard

full as a biker’s. How many great

poets ride a motorcycle?

OK -- T.S. Eliot on a Harley? Tu Fu on a dirt bike? These poems spin themselves out of a centrifuge of hypnotic reverie and desire. They are as intense in unfurling the colors of seduction as they are in shading the darker, more inflected, hues of elegy. Grief and desire flow together here, becoming a single mesmerizing red-blue flame.

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Wedding Day

Dana Levin

Copper Canyon Press: 72 pp., $14

Dana levin’s poems are extravagant, yet they are self-contained and circumspect. Her mind keeps making unexpected connections, and the poems push beyond convention in structure and imagery. They surprise us:

The story of guns in someone

else’s city, every day with your

toast and coffee --

Then the red and blue over the

green of the park, oranged in

the trash can fires.

Could anything be purely

aesthetic

when appearance was the

symptom of a disease --

You drove past them under a

regiment of stars.

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Ghost Pain

Sydney Lea

Sarabande Books: 102 pp., $13.95

“Ghost pain” is an expansive and protean narrative. The title’s reference to the phantom discomfort felt after limbs have been lost can also mean the suffering of the dead, of lost ones. People gather in these poems (“one more safe tiny place amid the great unsafe”); thus the living and dead seem connected by their longing for a haven (“and the only miracle for this lonely minute: / we were inside”) and for someone to tell the story of personal salvation. These talky, bluesy poems go on in one’s head long after they’ve been read.

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My Noiseless Entourage

Charles Simic

Harcourt: 66 pp., $22

It takes just one glimpse of Charles Simic’s work to establish that he is a master, ruler of his own eccentric kingdom of jittery syntax and signature insight:

Extraordinary efforts are being made

To hide things from us, my

friend.

Some stay up into the wee hours

To search their souls.

Others undress each other in darkened rooms.

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Star Dust

Frank Bidart

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 84 pp., $20

The last book in this roundup is, fittingly, Frank Bidart’s “Star Dust.” (A review of its first section, published as “Music Like Dirt,” appeared here in 2002.) That section still retains its separateness, yet all the pieces in this volume share a terrible poetic heart: a violence, a hunger for what it means to “create,” to make something from nothing, to tear flesh from flesh and spirit from flesh, just as our bodies are made of the ash of stars, of stardust, so illusion clouds our human perspective.

If the gods ever give you

words, one night in

sleep you will wake to find

me above you.

After sex & metaphysics, --

... what?

What you have made.