POETRY IN REVIEW

1 6 9 R 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 To call an author – especially a poet – conventional is, usually, an insult. But maybe it shouldn’t be. Modernism taught us to prize poets who seemed sui generis, reinventing whatever they used. Yet even those poets – even Gertrude Stein, never mind Yeats – encountered , and learned, and passed on complex conventions, if not from older poetry then from other parts of language and culture. No artist can throw out every convention at once. To learn to enjoy a poet, and to think we understand what a poet is doing, is to learn to understand that poet’s conventions: to see what’s new, and what’s changed, in poets who seem (at first) to repeat themselves, and to recognize patterns, repetitions, inheritance in work that seems alien, chaotic, or all too new. If you skim it rather than reading it carefully, Caki Wilkinson’s The Wynona Stone Poems might seem like nothing new: listen closely and you may change your mind. From its first page of terza T h e W y n o n a S t o n e P o e m s , by Caki Wilkinson (Persea, 81 pp., $15.95 paper) C o l d G e n i u s , by Aaron Kunin (Fence, 128 pp., $15.95 paper) S o u l i n S p a c e , by Noelle Kocot (Wave, 124 pp., $18 paper) T h e N i g h t W e ’ r e N o t S l e e p i n g I n , by Sean Bishop (Sarabande, 65 pp., $14.95 paper) K i n g s i z e , by Mette Moestrup (Subpress, 93 pp., $16 paper) 1 7 0 B U R T Y rima to its heartbreaking and anticlimactic last dimeter quatrains, Wilkinson’s clever, sad, charming, sneakily memorable book follows the progress – or, really, the failure to progress – of the underemployed title character’s small-town life. The fine first page, in which we see Stone swimming, tells us what’s wrong, but not why. The adult Wynona, ‘‘a week from thirty-four,’’ felt surer in her skin some years ago; things change. Don’t ask her how. It’s not impossible to lose, with coaching, your aim or sense of what you’re shooting for. Wynona Stone is having trouble broaching. The conversational fluencies of Wilkinson’s verse belie the harsh limits of Stone’s life, which feels like a trap. As a child, she felt lucky to have ‘‘a door that locks, / a costume box, / a family not / about to knock.’’ In high school, when she could have felt most fulfilled, she exercised – or wasted – her considerable basketball talents as the best player on a terrible team: her Lady Raiders’ ‘‘best skill / was getting rid of coaches, five so far.’’ Stone (like many real-life women’s basketball pros) improved her game by playing against older brothers and their male friends. Under the eyes of men ‘‘who, maybe, once, / were stars,’’ Wilkinson’s protagonist kept on, dizzy with a need to please, each pass and rebound sinking in as scent: leather and salt and hardwood wax. But she preferred those mornings, buzzerless, before the long shots counted. It would be better not to be part of one story, one season, one narrative about one life: better without a buzzer, no one keeping score. And Wynona’s life story isn’t much of a story. By the time she’s done with high school ‘‘all / she’s learned is loss / involves P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 7 1 R perspective.’’ Having majored (she quips, to herself) in ‘‘Vocational Equivocation,’’ she moves ‘‘back home,’’ where ‘‘you scream until somebody answers / or keep it to yourself and wait. And wait.’’ Wynona waits. The rest of her life will look (to her) like a series of ways to cut her losses, surrenders to expectations and social conventions : family ‘‘holidays . . . when pleasing means not disappointing...