DAYS OF WONDERNew & Selected PoemsBy Grace...

DAYS OF WONDER

New & Selected Poems

By Grace Schulman

Houghton Mifflin: 160 pp., $25

There are only a handful of poets who are “recognized,” that is to say, acknowledged as influential presences in the art. Of this handful, most are men. Women who write, from Carolyn Kizer to Kathleen Fraser (to name just two who’ve influenced my life as a poet), are often relegated to the waiting room of critical opinion. There should be more poets in the contemporary pantheon. There should be more poets (deserving writers of both sexes) whose work is followed with the attention we owe to poetry.

Grace Schulman is a writer of mature power and passion. Her later work confirms, as Harold Bloom says, her “emergence into authentic eminence.” Her book, “Days of Wonder,” offers selected poems from her four earlier books as well as new work.

In the book’s epigraph, Schulman quotes Chaucer: “The lyf so shorte, the craft so long to lerne.” This sentiment informs her perspective, from the whimsical humor of “Poetry Editor” (She was poetry editor at The Nation for many years) to the dark beauty of “Notes From Underground: W.H. Auden on the Lexington Avenue IRT.”

The excitement of witnessing this poet’s growth from poem to poem and book to book belongs to the reader following the “altering light” of the earthly to the presence of the miraculous, from sonnets to ghazals, to “the blue wonder of what might be.”

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CASCADIA

By Brenda Hillman

Wesleyan University Press:

78 pp., $12.99 paper

William Wordsworth said (in his famous Preface) that it is assumed that when an “Author” writes that “he will gratify certain known habits of association,” thus defending his own writing against the judgments of readers used to John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. As another famous poet noted in an essay on Obscurity, it is necessary to defend the “modern poet” against the reader accustomed to Wordsworth. Obscurity is a charge leveled against a good deal of contemporary poetry--and not without justification. For each (rare) authentic and original poet, there rises up a mob of imitators--and much “disjunctive” and “experimental” poetry easily falls into the category of boring, self-conscious, “subjectless” brain drone. At first glance, Brenda Hillman’s “Cascadia” seems precious--with its words falling out of the text and landing on the bottom of the page or in the side margins--as if its syntax were spun in a centrifuge.

most natives A poem floats

inside its margins

They are death

and birth receding

Say Lom-poke Beauty is not

an impasse

Better not to

blame

The loved one

for a slip

However, “Cascadia” has a subject. Or rather, two subjects: geology and heroin addiction--the shifting prism of the two preoccupations (and the flashing distractions of style) draw the reader away from known “habits of association.”

Cascadia, Hillman tells us, is what California was called when it was underwater.

Cascadia didn’t

merge it floated

Tulelake Why did the

chicken cross

the ocean

I recommend this book to all who doubt poetry’s capacity to reinvent itself. Hillman is making language dance for her. In the words of “Shirley”--an eccentric, inventive doctor’s wife whom Hillman “recreates,” along with Shirley’s 1851 California--”I never did care much for water in the abstract, though it’s useful to make coffee.”

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CHANGEABLE THUNDER

By David Baker

University of Arkansas Press:

104 pp., $16 paper

David Baker’s “Changeable Thunder” is an original and haunting collection of poems. Notions of thunder as both the voice of the jeremiad and Old Testament judgment, reference to Hesiod and magical ion-charged air are woven by Baker throughout the book.

The level of attentiveness in these poems, which build on the American vernacular and a developing sense of American “identity” is inspired and unflinching. Here he gives us Midwest Georgics:

The wind is the weather. The worst will blow

off the surge in a matter of

moments--

the best is a blessing, less rain

or ruin

but no less a shock for the

suddenness.

Baker introduces Thomas Carlyle, Roland Barthes, Ann Carson and Paul Celan to the Rev. Edward Taylor and the struggling Ohio farmer--and he makes the “conversation” last.