POETRY IN REVIEW: RANGE, BETTS, DELANTY, GRINNELL, COHEN, FOSTER

1 5 4 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N B U R T If that great democrat, that multiculturalist avant la lettre, that once far overrated, now far underrated good poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were to step into a time machine in 1866 and emerge today, he might be heartened, and unsurprised, by much of American culture: he might (no sure thing) even welcome modern feminism, given the years he spent as a stay-at-home dad. He’d also find much to admire – so I imagine – in Americans whose poetic careers began in the 1950s, and in the 1970s, and even in the 1990s (A. E. Stallings, I’m looking at you). Then he might scratch his great beard and look up to the heavens; plenty of new verse techniques have emerged in the years that I missed (he might muse), but what of the old ones? Can anyone now under forty come even close to the mastery of accentual-syllabic verse, to the strictly rhymed sonnets, the consonance-rich couplets, and the S c r i p t o r i u m , by Melissa Range (Beacon, 96 pp. $18 paper) B a s t a r d s o f t h e R e a g a n E r a , by Reginald Dwayne Betts (Four Way, 72 pp., $15.95 paper) B o o k S e v e n t e e n , by Greg Delanty (Louisiana State University Press, 94 pp., $19.95 paper) H e l l F i g u r e s , by E. Tracy Grinnell (Nightboat, 160 pp., $16.95 paper) C o h e r e r, by Alicia Cohen (Verge, 107 pp., $15 paper) A S w a r m o f B e e s i n H i g h C o u r t , by Tonya Foster (Belladonna, 140 pp., $16 paper) 1 5 5 R smooth stanzas that I and my hundreds of thousands of readers once prized? Can they do it – and this, in my time, was the hard part – while finding something memorable to say? I imagine the great technician, the irenic sage, frowning gently over a stack of two dozen undistinguished but perfectly metrical first books, and then I imagine him smiling as he reads Melissa Range’s Scriptorium, in which the native Tennessean (now teaching in Wisconsin) does what the best of the Fireside Poets once did. She has not only mastered received technique but used that technique to say things about her language and mine, about modern politics and geography, about Christian and post-Christian outlooks that she could not have said otherwise. Like Range’s earlier volume Horse and Rider, Scriptorium has a plan, or (as we say now) an elevator pitch, an aspect common to most of the poems, or rather two aspects that alternate (with additional poems in between). It holds perhaps a dozen sonnets (depending on how you count them) about medieval pigments in illuminated manuscripts – woad, verdigris, ‘‘Orpiment’’: King’s yellow for the King’s hair and halo, mixed if the monastery can’t a√ord the shell gold or gold leaf to crown the Lord, to work the letters of his name, the Chi-Ro, in trumpet spirals and triquetras, the yellow a cheap and lethal burnishing, the hoard not gold but arsenic and sulfur. It also holds almost a dozen stanzaic poems about southern upland dialect words and pronunciations heard in Range’s family, such as ‘‘hit’’ (for ‘‘it’’) and ‘‘ski√’’: ‘‘It’s a-ski≈n’,’’ we say, to mean there’s not much, there won’t be much, and it’ll be gone in two shakes. When Range rhymes – when she fills pages with internal rhymes and half-rhymes and intricate consonance – she isn’t just filling out forms; she’s asking why we have forms, in life and in art, and how we can tell when the forms are empty, as in the ghazal 1 5 6 B U R T Y ‘‘Negative Theology’’: ‘‘My mother calls me name, asks me to pray...