The Sacred art of Becoming

Mystery, romance, wisdom, whimsy, beatitude — this is what we crave in poetry and Elaine Equi delivers. In the divided camps of American poetry, she has forged an original style. Her persona stretches between past eras and coming frontiers. Formal structures are complemented by informal tones as she toggles from elegant to broad.

Subjects are broached with a gimlet eye, revealing their glimmer and their dross. Disparate images jigsaw together under the command of a clear, captivating voice. Gratifying, exhilarating at times, the poems are compressed and fizzy — like champagne.

From the panoramic (“Still Life with Radish”) to the solitary (“Looking Out the Window in a Novel”), Equi is ardent. She is here to discover interior truths — to see even the intangibles of the book’s title. Her modus operandi is: “I prefer to look into rather than out of.”

Equi folds the fabric of our evolving society into her metaphors with precision. Computers, cell phones, surveillance — all manner of communication and its attendant devices are considered. References to history, biology, and realms of knowledge other than linguistic abound. Science (natural and social) offers an armature for some poems. “Wandering the Wormhole” is a bit of a pinhole photograph laid over a moment of meditation.

At the height of her game in this new book, her fourteenth, Equi is a rigorous and nuanced practitioner. From the standpoint of craft, her praxis remains plastic and permeable to passing thoughts. Adding just the right elements in the right amounts, the poems cohere in something akin to alchemy.

A trip to get X-rays becomes a graceful, amusing vignette in “Lazy Bones.”

“I want to tell him / My bones are shy. // I don’t exercise. / I love coffee. They know they’re weak / and don’t like being photographed.” Looking inside is a running motif and is literal in this poem.

A New York School conversational mien and painterly eye add crisp texture. A mundane situation becomes a visual treat in “Like Banners, My T-shirts hang.”

“Turquoise and white / next to baby blue and orange. // Royal blue and purple // next to violet and red.”

Equi’s titles are often used as framing devices, indicative of her approach to composition. “Exquisite Corpse Pose” begins with a humorous pantomime of possible hybrids like, “My pelvis is a soup ball awaiting a creme fraiche from on high.” In part three of this poem, the author unveils a counterpart: “the she that is and is not me / must spread identity evenly.” In the fourth section, she again finds herself “startled to find another ‘me.’”

This other that the poet struggles to conjure and record, remains amorphous. “It only half listens / as I talk to myself.” In the final section, Equi notes that one must surface from a deeper existence and return regularly to “the camouflage / of everydayness.”

Such submersions into existence sound many chords. Lamentation recurs as she witnesses the atrophy of social interaction in favor of remote experience. She’s investigated this territory previously as the title of a former book, Click and Clone (2011), suggests.

How people connect becomes fodder for a psychological portrait of shallow relationships in “The Algorithm Introduced Us.” Equi’s persona delves into the rituals we use to find for companionship.

“Deep in the Rectangular Forest” is a pained portrait of internet culture, employing nature to evoke its own absence with a stunning metaphor:

Flitting from screen to screen,We pollinated the mostly mediocre contentWith an innocuous brand of wit.

This poem nails our chimeric time, when codes and memes stand in for meaning. The next poem titled “The Thing Is,” continues the theme of anomie in a digital age. It begins by asking: “What is the difference between objects and things? / Things, I think, have less personality.”

Inserting “I think” into her argument, adds convincing personality to the speaker. That sense of a recognizable other is a large part of Equi’s appeal. Her voice is authoritative but confidential.

It is with sorrow that she notes that things “no longer...