Poetry

Secular Pantheism by Matthew Hupert ’78. I have been thinking about this title. Pantheism, a religion that believes that the divine or God is immanent in nature, is at the opposite pole from the secular, which sees neither the divine nor God anywhere. While this poet appears to be mostly secular, when he lifts moments, thoughts, experiences, relationships out of the big unprocessed pile of reality and fixes them into a poem, he imbues them with something very much akin to the sacred. This sanctifying touch elevates the main subjects of this collection – love, poetry, and family. Yet the profane is never very far away. His zingers are razor-sharp and often funny. If you read these poems, be sure to get to the very end.

Never has love at first sight been so dramatically rendered as in “2190 Days.” It is only in the final verse that we, like…

The Crazy Bunch by Willie Perdomo ’85. If you’d like to take an anthropological trip to a different culture right within the confines of Manhattan island, this book is for you. These poems take you into a classically compressed weekend during which a group of young men in Spanish Harlem come of age (or are tragically thwarted from coming of age) while hanging out (“lamping”) on the street corners and littered playgrounds of their neighborhood to the sound track of 80’s-90’s hip hop. An aura of myth envelopes the events as they occur through the filter of memory in a space now altered by time. Apparently, you can’t go home again.

I count among these poems about 11 dialogs between an entity called The Poetry Cops and Papo aka Skinecky (the dominant voice of the work) and his friends. Since several begin with Papo showing the poetry cops a photogra…

Body of Work by Tina Cane ff. In this evocative work, Tina explores a vast range of topics, from concrete vignettes depicting the poverty of her Chinese immigrant grandparents to a cosmic perspective on motherhood. In the first section, REALITY SERIES, we are introduced to the theme of the passage of time as the poet, apparently back in New York after an absence, sees a familiar skateboarder “on the same oldschool/ skateboard as ever” still around, not as changed as one might expect. Then she sees her own first rebellious gray hair. Poems memorialize her mother piercing her ears and a fire in her bedroom. We see her Chinese grandfather toting home a television set, still in the box, but obliging the family to watch the old set where everything is green because it hasn’t yet completely worn out. Life Hacks offers some great suggestions (before you discard a po…

The Analyst, Poems by Molly Peacock ff. Powerful emotion is the engine for powerful poetry, and this collection of poems erupts from a raging furnace fire. Behind the fraught story of the poet and her analyst is the violent childhood that propelled the poet into treatment. During the decades of analysis, the poet learns to take charge of her trauma but of course it remains, fueling her work. The occasion of this collection is the analyst’s stroke, which turns the tables on their relationship.

The poems abound in metaphor (cranium is to ideas as fishbowl is to fish) puns (what a distance there is between “rest” and “the rest”), and wordplay (the progression of the word “jar” from pottery jar, to Plath’s bell jar, to the canning jar). Perhaps George Herbert’s “Glass of Blessings” and the cracked mug belong to this leitmotif.

I guess it will come as no surpri…