"Croon/ the catastrophic lyric, cream it, diva the infernal tessituras," Teare writes in one poem, and whether about incest, suicide, or experiences as a male prostitute in the Deep South, his poetry is indeed "opera written for the burning stage." Fully cognizant of the challenges posed by autobiographical poetry, the risks to the self in revisiting painful material, and the risks to the material from the inevitable hazards of memory, Teare names the dangers in his path and then faces them head on. His poems look incessantly both outward and inward, and the poetic self becomes a locus of constant revision: "When I say ‘I' I mean eye, sum of my watching." For an observer as attentive as Teare, this is a sum that expands exponentially.

Teare speaks, even to himself, with a directness that is sometimes brutal: "a book opens to a story many more brave than you have entered, & you are in it, you are here to learn, to/ die & this is how a witch gets business." Drawing from a wide range of sources, especially fairy tales, myths, and the Bible, Teare consistently finds ways to locate the personal— without ever diminishing it—on broader intellectual and psychological grounds. Somehow, and this is the mystery and accomplishment of Teare's art, his poems manage to be grounded in the perceptual immediacy of scrupulous, carefully sculpted description while delivering the heady intoxications of a profligate, highly musical language. In this, Teare's first book, we see a poetry of profound learning, deep humanity, and resounding promise.

 

"You'll know me by my approach/I'm coming on foot with a diamond in my mouth." In this final couplet of her remarkable first book, Worth, Robyn Schiff is able to do something quite unusual for a young poet: she puts her money where her mouth is. The diamond speaks both to the idea of ornament, which is indicated initially by the calling cards of couture houses that the poems present themselves with ("House of Worth," "House of Dior," the staggering "House of Versace") and more compellingly still by the trappings of form the poems take on, restructure, and ultimately redefine. When was the last time one read a poem with no more than two syllables per line that didn't merely feel like a parlor trick? In "House of Versace" the short line propels the poem toward an inevitable reckoning: "(I re-/membered/ the world/when he/entered/with a/wet um-/brella)/ the op-/ ening/ (and I/was ash-/amed)." At the same time repetition like birdsong (and, indeed, the book is awash in those winged fashionistas—"Devil Finch," "Vest-Pocket Finch," "Goodbye Finch") brings us back into the folds of memory, into an interior, lyric space that the surface narrative bridles against. The poems are perhaps most rewarding on the formal level; entirely contemporary yet keenly aware of the gifts the canonically formal poem has given us. And isn't that what truly great couture does? It takes what we know, takes it apart and brings it back to us as a music we remember and are utterly unprepared for.

 

"It is a bad time in America for poems," an expression of momentary desperation and one of the few statements in Michael Carlson's melancholy yet verbally spry first collection that we might take at face value. It falls at the end of "Spring Night After Rain," after these lines:

I sit down dumb beneath the fronds.

The wind is a process. Air is a thing.

The ground is a cool grey plane

to get lonely and sick and quiet upon.

The poet, silenced in his efforts of association, confesses his slump and climbs out of it by performing a set of basic analyses, summoning up physical elements (air, wind, rain, sun, moon), national tropes (cows, crows, highways, baseball), and states of being (diminishing, suffering, dreaming), then deploying them in various configurations that undermine our notions of nature, America, and language itself. Dawn becomes a diminishing of night, suffering a graduation requirement, snow an emotion.

Three chapters of the volume plot a triangle with points in Carlson's boyhood home, Rhode Island; Iowa, where he attended college; and Brooklyn, where he now resides. A fourth section toys with poetic forms favored by Pound, Donne, and Rimbaud to unexpected effects. The Midwestern poems are alternately earnest—"It's true, this weather. I believe in it."—and bleak—"The sick cow's dehydrated udder/dips down in a buttery puddle." In the Rhode Island poems, Carlson fashions several tender elegies from the fertile sentimental stuff of his childhood.

Carlson's willful confounding of images reflects a sense that standard poetic modes are somehow exhausted. In the Brooklyn chapter, his weariness becomes explicit, and the poet comes to resemble one of his characters: "tired of irony, / The son of a plumber loves peacocks." In many Brooklyn neighborhoods you can find no shortage of irony, emblazoned on T-shirts and inked in little magazines. But to insist that its streets offer scant traces of the peacock would be to deny this poet his ample pleasure and pride in seeing.

 

Last summer, I saw an English falconer with flowing dark hair read her poems. It doesn't get more romanticky Arthurian than that. It would have been disgusting if the poems hadn't been remarkable. The poet was Helen Macdonald, she really is a falconer, and her book, Shaler's Fish, is a lovely thing. It's also an accessible introduction to the often heady stuff—quite unlike much American work— that's written by those on the UK's small innovative poetry scene. Macdonald writes in a version of a familiar disjunctive style, favoring sudden topic changes and occasional nonstandard syntax. These days, such moves often signify little more than the poet's allegiances or training; they only infrequently jar or excite. Macdonald's poems excite. The fragments are consistently pitched so that we're presented, through acute, often synesthetic descriptions, with a fierce emotional focus. Macdonald's not afraid to write gorgeously, as here (work that consonance, Helen):

Wren. Full song. No subsong. Call of alarm, spreketh & ought

damage the eyes with its form, small body, tail pricked up & beak like a hair

trailed through briars & at a distance scored with lime scent in the nose

like scrapings from a goldsmith's cuttle . . .

Publishing poetry in Britain is tougher than it is in the U.S. There's no university press system to speak of and the small presses seem less well endowed; they could use our support. Reliably interesting tiny UK presses include Reality Street Editions, West House Books, and Etruscan Books, which published Macdonald. It's worth seeking them out.