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

(Continued from page 1)

Darcie Dennigan, Corinna, A-Maying the Apocalypse

Prizewinning books sometimes resemble the work of the judges who choose them. Fordham Poets Out Loud winner Darcie Dennigan and judge (and MacArthur winner) Alice Fulton both favor cleareyed lyricism and overboard neo-metaphysical conceits. Dennigan is as comfortable intercutting the legend of St. Ursula with a girls'-night-out birthday party at a bar in Boston as she is imagining a foundling hospital where the nurses simulate maternal heartbeats by putting swaddled clocks in the cribs:

And the papers covered it—a new invention from orphans' nurses—a babybalm device, a mother apparatus—but really it was just meter, after all, just a pattern of beats—but the papers liked that too—that meter was portable—they thought it was cute that we were teaching the babies to say meter instead of mother.

(from "The New Mothers")

There is little chance of mistaking the cadences of Dennigan's long lines and paragraphs for ordinary prose. Her rhythmic phrasings come in consistently pleasing variation, not in lock-step imitation of the ones coming before and after. She also makes music when signaling her themes. Taking literally Pound's poetic command to "make it new," she includes the word new in the titles of four poems; every poem in the first half of the book includes the word mother.

New poets, when they are very good, can transmute confusion into excitement. Dennigan is excellent. "I didn't know exactly what I was doing there, so I was going/ to do it harder," she writes. It should not take another contest to bring Dennigan's next book to print.

Eavan Boland, New Collected Poems

Director of the creative writing program at Stanford University, Eavan Boland is a commanding poet, capable of great intimacies and public gestures: Her 1998 collection, The Lost Land, is dedicated to Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and the U.N. high commissioner of human rights. In the narrative of her collected work so far, the turning point from Irish national treasure to international ambassador of letters comes about halfway through, with the 1987 poem "The Glass King":

If we could see ourselves, not as we do—
in mirrors, self-deceptions, self-regardings—
but as we ought to be and as we have been:
poets, lute-stringers, makyres and abettors

of our necessary art, soothsayers of the ailment
and disease of our times, sweet singers,
truth tellers, intercessors for self-knowledge—
what would we think of these fin-de-siecle

half-hearted penitents we have become
at the sick-bed of the century: hand-wringing
elegists with an ill-concealed greed
for the inheritance?

There are passages in her work up to this point that attain similar intensity, some metrical sentences six or seven lines long, but nothing like this verse paragraph, a moving dragon of fiery righteousness.

After Boland catches onto the power of packing an extended speech in a compressed space, her phrasings get clearer and stranger: A water bucket makes "zinc-music," a neighbor's stream makes a "fluid sunset," bad luck might see "an unexplained/ fever speckle heifers." In her more recent collections, she aims to soar from a standing start. She interrupts her fable "Embers" to pierce the reader with a look:

When he woke in the morning she was young and beautiful.
And she was his, forever, but on one condition.
He could not say that she had once been old and haggard.
He could not say that she had ever … here I look up.

You are turned away. You have no interest in this.

Among her near-contemporary countrymen, two have already become last names: Heaney, Muldoon. Boland is due to join them, and New Collected Poems is, for the moment, the book to find and read.

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Jordan Davis lives in New York City.
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