good beast by Andrew Michael Roberts (review)

We call them “collections” of poetry because they are almost always that: a gathering. The best poetry presents what could have been lost if not for the poet’s bowerbird-like interest. It may be formed from minute details made luminous through presentation, or from memories, grimy like coins, scraped to new life and displayed. Readers of Andrew Michael Roberts’s good beast will find four nests of his idiosyncratic assemblage, composed of the stuff that he’s deemed worthy to save.

Analogues to Roberts’s style include William Carlos Williams’s terser objectivist work. Contemporaries include Joshua Marie Wilkinson, whose oeuvre epitomizes a poetry of the Northwest from which Roberts hails: highly aestheticized, image-heavy, and pastoral but rife with modern culture. Roberts established an interpretation of this style in his Iowa Poetry Prize-winning debut collection, 2009’s something has to happen next, and has evolved it with good beast. Gone are the epigrammatic moments of that collection—no eight-word poems about the moon to be found here—and present is a tone that is traumatized and traumatizing, less precocious and more sobering.

How Roberts’s poems sit on the page is one notable consistency. No line comes close to touching the right margin; this choice lends Roberts’s work a sense of fragility and speed, with each piece mimicking a remembered dream’s arrival and disintegration. This creates an urgency much like Morse code, where each series of taps completes smaller clauses and larger communications at once, which the recipient rushes to capture and decode.

This means that individual lines often do not stand alone as units of meaning. Numerous instances can be found of lines like “there’s a,” “while we,” and “that.” The stanza instead becomes that unit of meaning, and from there the traditional roles of poetic structure pass down, with each section serving functionally as a stanza, and each of the four books in the collection forming something like a poem. (It’s unsurprising to find that the collection’s first book, “death star: a history in fragments” was first published as a “poem series” in Seattle Review.)

Perhaps because it successfully executes a straightforward concept, “death star,” which reads as a childhood memoir, leads off the collection. Through titular fragments, Roberts explores stark and startling tableaus of latchkey children in the off-hours of adult supervision; forgotten children who, like daredevils, both fear and embrace omnipresent danger, here embodied by pedophiles, step-parents, and Satan (these poems are often addressed to the devil’s many appellations). But as with the child whose body is discovered “wrapped in / tyvek // and barbed / wire” in the poem “easter 1982,” mortality and senselessness do more than threaten.

Death becomes a greater focus in “good beast,” the collection’s second book. The sequence begins with “anthem,” a poem spoken to no less than the world; while much lyric poetry can assume the entire planet as its audience, Roberts reaches for the grandiose in this declaration and mostly earns it. More astonishing is the book’s centerpiece, “the golden arm,” a flat-out gorgeous multi-part poem—one of the collection’s longest—structured in wandering, wondrous sentences. In both, prosthetics become an effective operative image, asking: How do we disassociate ourselves from our small territories, and our stiff positions of influence in them? The poems’ slim, skeletal appearances belie Roberts’s intellectual muscle, here fully flexed.

The book’s coda, “flipbook of the dead,” exposes nerve endings that portend the rawer and more ostentatious mode of the next section, “thunder & gristle.” Most eager to please and to upset, this is good beast’s least effective stretch; the former, artful choreography gives way to stomping sarcasm, and pop cultural references crash into coarser emotions. Some of the crutches of something has to happen next emerge from storage, too, including a moon that doesn’t “give a shit less,” and poems addressed to Molotov cocktails, angels, America, and “Walter” Whitman.

Angst also arrives, as in “darkling prophet,” with its sulking resolution, and in “we bruise...