books: Reading between the lines.

Best in VerseIt's National Poetry Month—what should you read?

By Jordan Davis
Posted Tuesday, April 29, 2008, at 3:02 PM ET

Poets talk about the attention brought by National Poetry Month the way kids talk about food at summer camp—it's terrible, and there's not enough of it. For the rest of the reading world, the initiative has all the appeal of a charity drive. While there's plenty of good poetry being written today, there's at least six times as much of the not-so-good variety. Take heart: Slate has winnowed the stack down to a manageable few.

Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems

Mark Doty is one of the premier elegists of the AIDS crisis, and his best poems seldom have time for mere description. In early pieces such as "Days of 1981," the speaker hovers, bewildered, on the border between spectator and active participant, the poem moving in and out of rhyme:

The smokestacks

and office towers loomed, a half-lit backdrop
beyond the baseball diamond. I didn't want him ever to stop,
and he left me breathless and unsatisfied.

He was a sculptor, and for weeks afterward I told myself
I loved him, because I'd met a man and wasn't sure
I could meet another—I'd never tried—

and because the next morning, starting
off to work, the last I saw of him, he gave me a heart,
ceramic, the marvel of a museum school show

his class had mounted. No one could guess
how he'd fired hollow clay entirely seamless
and kept it from exploding.

In later poems like "My Tattoo" or "Theory of Marriage," Doty displays a gift for interweaving arresting image with tender narrative. A selection of 80 of Doty's best pages along these lines would be a pleasure; Fire to Fire, however, is four times that length.

Doty is on record defending his right to make verbal art out of something other than plain (straight) speech, but this principled refusal to pin meanings down isn't the only obstacle the reader encounters. In his less successful poems, nothing ever is; it always seems. Doty habitually conflates yearning with minimizing—a little, nearly, almost, and not exactly are his go-to qualifiers. And he asks a lot of questions, mainly unanswerable ones ("how could they/ compete with sunset's burnished/ oratorio?"). These are quibbles, though. Doty's new work is getting clearer without giving up its hard-won beauty.

Sidney Wade, Stroke

Sidney Wade's imagination is as powerful as any American poet's since Wallace Stevens. The poems in her fifth collection, Stroke, are apocalyptically cheerful elegies for the body politic. They sometimes sound like an arts section taking back material (and a mood) long abandoned to the science or front pages:

The imperatives of the dominant glib prevail

and there's no hope for the culture.
It's monopoloid and tick-rich,

filled with words that will kill you.

(from "Nothing but the Truth")

Wade studs her poems with $10 words—say, manumission and necrosis—some of which she turns into portmanteaus worthy of George W. Bush's "misunderestimate": protruberant, hystericalectomy, immargination. She rhymes in an equally confident manner, matching barges with largesse, ruthless with toothless, and corrosive with explosive.

Though they are often transporting, Wade's poems always yield to paraphrase, pointing to something recognizable in the real world or the news. Her project—to remain sane despite the gloom these words point to—requires that she reassure herself and the reader that while we really are seeing what we're seeing, the consolations of light and love still exist:

I didn't have a forever grant,
but we dealt with that as masterful adults.
We approached the ultimate adding machine
and grabbed us a statue bereft of sin

and some mausoleum gear.
There's not enough shriek and swagger
in our utterly transgressive faith, he confessed,
but he looked down on the others

in their cold, crawling context.
Those people are injured by the time of day,
he sniffed. As we entered a carnelian cloud,
I suggested we leave early and often.

(from "The Visionary from Apopka")

The poet-critic Richard Howard has referred to the Parnassian quality of Wade's poems, to their insistence on beauty, glory, and exalted feeling, and he is exactly right: She believes that "A planetful of pure desire/ Is all a poet should require/ To set the commonplace afire." She persists in this belief even as she diagnoses irreversible national damage. Having enlarged her scope with each collection, she's becoming something of an oracle of the outlook for intelligence and happiness. Here's hoping more and more readers come to consult her.

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Jordan Davis lives in New York City.
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