POETS’ CORNER

Swirl

Susan McCabe

Red Hen Press: 64 pp., $11.95

It is a pleasure to note the publication of “Swirl,” the debut collection of poetics scholar Susan McCabe. The poems move swiftly and often enigmatically, but are always gracefully choreographed and memorably driven by an intoxicating voice, aswirl on the page in balletic turns and elliptical leaps.

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Departure

Rosanna Warren

W.W. Norton: 112 pp., $22.95

Inspired by Max Beckmann’s triptych in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Rosanna Warren engems the title poem of “Departure” with quotations from the Italian poet Guido Guinizelli and Beckmann himself. The quotations from Guinizelli are rendered by Warren, a distinguished translator of classical and contemporary verse. The ambitions of this poem seem to embody the poet’s ongoing and powerful desire to encompass and translate a pure experience of intimacy and loss.

In a taut and cryptic style, she steers her imagery in the direction of immediate, unresolved dramatic tension:

There will always be, on one

side, a man bound to a

column

with both hands chopped off;

there will always be

a still life with hand grenade

grapes and a woman

kneeling

before an executioner who

swings a bag of iron fish

Poetic meditations on works of art are commonplace; this one is not. It is both fierce and exquisite: on fire but coldly admonishing, “... because the oarsman is blindfolded / because the crowned fisherman has his back to us / because that open boat / has not set sail / from our shores / nor will it, while we are alive.” The poems in “Departure” are all very much in this mode -- enriched by classical allusion, boldly conceived, celebrating the contraries, the gods of marriage and paradox.

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Left Wing of a Bird

Arthur Vogelsang

Sarabande Books: 88 pp., $20.95

Arthur Vogelsang’s poetry has always been whimsical, generated by energetic, unconventional inquiry into all manner of human experience. Still, to take the sweeping, ironically interrogative aspect of the poems as (say) knockoff Ashbery is to miss the authoritative, oddly direct original persona: a kind of pit boss in the poetry casino. Vogelsang seems coy at times, but he is not.

Right now remember the Hopis?

lived

With opened doors, no doors, to

connect

With anything when they were

sleeping,

No vulnerability unless

A room or apartment was closed

And they were trapped by the

foot like animals

These are dreamlike yet wide awake poems, and they are vulnerable, despite their big-time bravado. They are doors, opening onto new vistas.

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Call Me Ishmael

Tonight

Agha Shahid Ali

W.W. Norton: 88 pp., $21.95

I’ve talked about Agha Shahid Ali before; his death in 2001 was an enormous loss to poetry and (in lesser order) the cultural insights that poetry offers. His posthumous “Call Me Ishmael Tonight” sets the ghazal form before readers again, deepening its lyric sweetness and expressive possibilities. These ghazals (readers will readily grasp the repeating-word ancient couplet form) take on various subjects, including mortality:

What will suffice for a true-love

knot? Even the rain.

But he has bought grief’s lottery,

bought even the rain....

After we died -- That was it!--

God left us in the dark.

And as we forgot the dark, we

forgot even the rain.

Drought was over. Where was I?

Drinks were on the house.

For mixers, my love, you’d poured -- what? -- even the rain.