POETRY IN REVIEW: SIX POETS

1 5 2 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 you knew nothing of Paul Muldoon except his poetry and you learned that he had edited a book series devoted to poets not yet famous, you might expect that their poems would resemble his own: clever and sonically complicated, elaborate as Fabergé eggs, dredging bizarre words from dictionaries, bleakly comic and puzzling or evasive even when – as often – they carried torrents of sadness or joy inside. The Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, revived under Muldoon’s aegis in 2010, has published at least one poet of ludic complication, Troy Jollimore (At Lake Scugog, 2011). But most of Muldoon’s selections – which are now complete (Susan Stewart takes over the series for 2014) – tell a di√erent story about what he wants from contemporary poetry and what other publishers do not provide. T h e Tw o Y v o n n e s : P o e m s , by Jessica Greenbaum (Princeton University Press, 80 pp., $29.95 cloth; $12.95 paper) A l m a n a c : P o e m s , by Austin Smith (Princeton University Press, 96 pp., $35, cloth; $12.95 paper) A G l o s s a r y o f C h i c k e n s : P o e m s , by Gary J. Whitehead (Princeton University Press, 72 pp., $29.95 cloth; $14.95 paper) B r i n k , by Shanna Compton (Bloof Books, 86 pp., $15 paper) L o b s t e r P a l a c e s , by Ann Kim (Flood Editions, 96 pp., $14.95 paper) 3 S e c t i o n s : P o e m s , by Vijay Seshadri (Graywolf, 64 pp., $22 cloth) 1 5 3 R Jessica Greenbaum, Austin Smith, and Gary J. Whitehead, Muldoon ’s final choices, write of di√erent places, in di√erent tones, but all three are mostly restrained and quietly serious. All make prose sense, but none could be called populist; none could be called hip, or even (like Muldoon) a√ected by pop music forms. Instead, their poems set up figures and anecdotes, close-ups and big pictures from realistically rendered present-day lives. Surprising in detail, though familiar in kind, they remind us of what individual poets and poems can still do when they are neither blindly devoted to any tradition nor working hard to reject the recent past. Also familiar in terms of what kinds of poems they try to write, but strange and insightful within them, Shanna Compton infuses the love sonnet, the lovers’ quarrel, the city skyline and the prospect poem with language that insists on its here-and-nowness, while Ann Kim redeems the East Asian borrowings, and the object lessons, of our starkest modernists. Stranger questions about what poems are and are not, why we want them and why we write them, come from a poet not earlier known for untraditional ways, Vijay Seshadri, whose 3 Sections might be the most unsettling book of American poems from 2013. Greenbaum’s poems in The Two Yvonnes record high, low, and middle points in a life understood as her own, from the suburban yearnings of childhood to the days of an empty-nest parent in New York. Her e√ects come mostly from syntax and tone; like other verse autobiographers (say, William Wordsworth), Greenbaum can let the modes of a long, complex sentence reflect belated realizations and unrealized anticipations, ways to set present against future and past. In ‘‘Promised Town,’’ You hoped your string of tickets would last all day, or someone’s parent, protectively wandering the Fund Fair, would buy you more because as it worked out, they cared for you. Some readers will find such lines pedestrian. The rest of us might see, in them, our lives, as we might see our children, or our friends’ neighbors’ children, in the literal pedestrians of Greenbaum ’s pleasant Brooklyn street: 1 5 4 B U R T Y Come seven-ten, there are the children...