Fear of falling

BOB HICOK’S poetry is a fleeting comfort, a temporary solace from the chaos of the world. Smart, honest, powerfully inventive, his writing asks the biggest questions while acknowledging that there are no answers beyond the imposed structure of the page.

Hicok’s new collection, “This Clumsy Living” (Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press: 102 pp., $14 paper), is full of stark moments of awareness, attempts to strike a balance between hope and loss. “There is a piece of a second / during which a jet is not flying / nor is it on the ground,” he writes in “Her my body.” “I’m working on a theory / that no one can die / inside that piece of a second. / If you are comforted / by this thought you are welcome / to keep it.”

Hicok, of course, is too smart to believe that words can save us, even as he wishes they could. “Every time I write,” he laments in “Waiting for my foot to ring,” “I try to hold / the world still by noticing how the world moves. Butterflies / fear the pins of this method, I fear what happens / after the pinhole at the end of this sentence.”

Here we have the human conundrum -- the inability to come to terms with uncertainty and evanescence in any satisfying sense. How do we relate to a universe that constantly eludes us? And what does it mean, this letting go?

Or, as Hicok puts it in “The active reader”: “[I]s fear what it means / to be human, am I what it means to be human, / why did the brain ransom the heart / to the mouth, why did we ever come down / from the trees?”

David L. Ulin

david.ulin@latimes.com