Meeting Ourselves

BOOK REVIEWS Muratori continuedfrom previous page and, as he has stated in interviews, Joseph needed time to assimilate the shock and comprehend its magnitude. The long meditation at the center oíInto It, "Why Not Say What Happens?," directly grapples with the need to fix the moment in a way that respects its presence and impact on the moments surrounding it. Chilling in its particulars ("One ofGarfinkle's patients / tripped over a severed foot while evacuating / the Stock Exchange"), the poem establishes the surreal immediacy ofthe event: "Everything / immense and out of context." This is the child's nightmare of Detroit enlarged, of local violence gone global: It's the details that dream out the plot. Rearrange the lies, the conceits. the crimes, the exploitation of needs and desires, and it's still there, the whole system's nervous system—inside it, at times, a dreamer at work, right now it's me. While the causes of the tragedy are systemic, built into the economies of power and wealth, the individual "dreamer" creates and perpetuates the reality of events in words. How does one negotiate the line between observation and activism? Between poetry and rant? This responsibility to dream the details becomes ever more critical at this moment in history, when "The technology to abolish the truth is now available" and the shared memory of any given event shrinks to whatever emblematic image the market-conscious cable news channels choose to deliver. Detail is the medium of presence, and truth lies at the intersection ofperception and.imagination. Synthesizing the aesthetics ofWilliams and Stevens with his own, Joseph's ars poética may be most succinctly expressed in this passage from "Inclined to Speak." Poetry can manifest: What is seen, heard, and imagined at the same time— that truth. A sort of relationship is established between our attention to what is furthest from us and what deepest in us. The poem, through the variable surfaces and depths of its language, provides a shared center for the multiple subjectivities of its readers. The body of Lawrence Joseph's vital and emotionally hard-won poetry suggests that each of us must discover his or her own tools of engagement with the world, forged in the crucible of personal experience, sociocultural context, and language. We don't need to be lawyers—or poets—to "live in the world of creation." We only have to pay attention. Fred Muratori 's poems and prose poems have appeared in Verse, LIT, The Best American Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and others. He is the Bibliographerfor English-language literature andfilm at the Cornell University Library. Meeting Ourselves Lern Coley Big Men Speaking to Little Men Philip Fried Salmon Poetry www.salmonpoetry.com 104 pages; paper, $15.00 Philip Fried's third book of poems, Big Men Speaking to Little Men, seems to emanate from New York City, perhaps because the poetryjournal he has edited for twenty-one years is called The Manhattan Review. Butjust as his Review is known for comprehensive looks at poetry from elsewhere—Australia in the last issue—Fried's poems refer to Atlanta, Paris, Rome, and Keoladeo, an Indian bird sanctuary. The bell-cow of the collection, the already anthologized "Early/Late," is also the most Manhattan -centered poem in the book. The speaker looks down onto the early moming street. "When the roofs of the cars are themselves a fiery / road of spectral highlights and drivers / stick shadows on the empty street— / that early, the self might overflowing // meet itself coming the other way." And not only does the self experience mitosis, the city also has a double: "somewhere in that city, but where / 1 could never be sure, is a miniature / of the city, reproducing every / bridge, canal house, and canal." Canal? A note reminds us that New York was once New Amsterdam. Fried complicates his replications by siting them in different dimensions. The book's title suggested to me a boss poking his finger into the chest of an underling, but Fried means smaller than Lilliputian . "The triumph of modern // life is the miniature ," he writes, and miniaturization runs through the collection like an underground river, seeping into many poems, usually to advantage...