WhimsyLand

I'm still reading Sarah's The Captain Lands in Paradise.  There's an excellent review by Christine Hume at Constant Critic.  A sample:  "Manguso fillets the signature styles of James Tate and Dean Young and disposes of their punch-line tendencies. That is, she begins with a flatly perverse or deceptively simple premise and whisks it off to exquisite extremes, often by way of berserk example and oddball qualification."  I think what is a smidgeon off-putting to me is the "essayishness" of many of the poems.  My reaction parallels my feeling about Jorie Graham's work as it progressed from evocative to expository.  Could be me, of course.  Usually is.

I don't read a lot of formal verse, but I love Julie Carter and A. E. Stallings' work.  Julie has collected her poems in pseudophakia, which Wikipedia tells me is "is the condition of having an intraocular lens in the eye", and for which, curiously, OED has no entry at all.  The volume includes Sparrow, my favorite sonnet of all time, as well as other poems, some free verse.  Julie's work seems so authentic (and perhaps Midwestern, or perhaps that's redundant) without falling into the trap of gratuitous heart-rending that is so common in New Formalism.  There's a lot of death and resurrection implied in these poems, not something I'm usually that fond of, but somehow it all seem right and normal coming from Julie's pen.  This from Deerfly:  "Deer flourish in this wildwood.  I have stared / while dozens dapple through the Escher trees / in quick battalions.  Yesterday, a pair / stood knee high in the grasses of the lea / between the wood and road.  Winter's dull teeth / had gnawed their hides, and scraped fat from their bones / but not to kill ..."

I received an Atlantic and Harper's today.  I'm still reading the quite excellent Verse volume, and haven't dented the Ploughshares yet.  Not to mention Pynchon's latest.  More tomorrow.