Warhorses – Pulitzer Prize-winner Yusef Komunyakaa’s latest book, tackling the issue of war through myth and history. I don’t want to spoil the end, but you’ll have to read the review. A unique gift to us all.

Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights – Belinda Subraman is a talented surprise in a package. I probably didn’t heap enough praise on her most recent chapbook. Still, a woman as creative and talented as this should get a good book review. Don’t miss it.

The Triggering Town – Richard Hugo was a real treasure. He managed to write one of the most beloved books on writing poetry for his time. Check out my thoughts on this book for aspiring poets.

These are the latest book reviews by World Class Poetry. Don’t miss them.

Alice B. Fogel, herself a widely published poet, has written one of the best primers to poetry in recent years. While I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect book, I will say that Fogel goes out of her way to make poetry less intimidating to those who do not understand the ins and outs of the poetic muse. Sans the technical language, her book Strange Terrain: A Poetry Handbook for the Reluctant Reader should ease your worries about not “getting it”.

Click the following link for a full and honest review of Strange Terrain: A Poetry Handbook for the Reluctant Reader and enjoy poetry with the rest of us.

• Contemporary antiquities
• Elevated valley
• Stupid genius
• Utopian nihilist

That last one is a real-world example. I can’t think of any that I’d have thought of at 21, but “utopian nihilist” is the type of phrase that I’d have enjoyed coming up with. I didn’t conjure this one, however. Milo Martin did.

Milo Martin is a West Coast slam poet who has traveled extensively in Europe as a touring poet. He is also the founder of the Utopian Nihilist poetry movement. Their principles are intriguing and exist as a list of 26 proclamations, to be found in the back of Martin’s debut book of poems, Poems For The Utopian Nihilist.

Here are a few hand selected verses from the Utopian Nihilist Manifesto:

• We are born Utopians; it is through the scarring of socialization that some of us become Nihilists.
• The Utopian sees the wine glass as half-full whereas the Nihilist sees it as half-empty. The Utopian Nihilist sees a libation suitable for consumption and ponders the history of the grape.
• Eclipse the obstacles. That which is undeniable cannot be denied.
• Do not consternate so much about the creation of art; make it the way that your pristine genesis mind initially bloomed it. Judge not self, lest thee be judged. Employ disregard.
• Vehement resistance to common ideas and swimming against the stream is our moral obligation.
• Democracy is dead, once a beautiful ideology.
• Hierarchies are illusory man-made constructs.
• Happiness is temporal and should be treated as such, knowing that there is also much pain and consternation to be experienced in balance. We are the supersonic Samsara sponge. This is our job as cheerful proletarians. As Utopian Nihilists. To soak up the paradox; to snort up the salt and pepper of things.

As you can see, there’s nothing original there, only the repackaging of things already said. So is Martin’s poetry. You can read the full review of Poems For The Utopian Nihilist here.

Tin House Magazine debuted in 1999. Since then it has been a powerhouse of postmodern poetry while making inroads into a new era. Frankly, I think we’ve moved beyond the postmodern, but some postmodern icons are still represented in the pages of the magazine as evidenced by its recently published anthology.

The anthology is titled Satellite Convulsions: Poetry From Tin House. World Class Poetry has published its honest review and we’d like to share with you our thoughts about it.

Feel free to make up your own mind, but the review of Satellite Convulsions: Poetry From Tin House can be found right here.

On another note, I’m testing some new social features at World Class Poetry, this blog’s sister site. The features are limited at present, but you can sign up and await further developments. If you have a Google or Yahoo! login, or an OpenID, then you can login without registering. Also, I’ve added comment fields on all the book reviews on the site. Feel free to drop by and leave your comments on the reviews or if you’ve read the books, offer your own feedback.

Note, you can’t comment on the book review introduction page. To leave a comment you’ll have to click one of the book review links and scroll to the bottom of the page to leave a comment on the individual book reviews. Thanks! See you there.

But I’ve managed to kick out two new book reviews this week. Actually, one of them is a reprint from a book review published elsewhere. The other is a new review. And I’ve finished reading another book for which I still have to write a review. Look for it in the next few days.

The first review is of The Knot by Bruce Spang. This poetry book is a personal journey through the discovery of sexual identity. Personal and reflective, witty, and provocative. Read the review here.

Sonata for Rain, however, is the pick of the week. Every time I review a book I try desperately to find two things: Something good to say and anything wrong with it. Everything else is a personal reaction. To be sure, most poets make it easy to reach both goals. Occasionally, I find it difficult to find one of those two things. Sonata for Rain made it hard for me to find anything wrong. I eventually gave up. Read the review then buy the book and see if you agree.

Both reviews will be featured in the next Hyperbole poetry e-zine. Goes out tomorrow night.

Publisher-poet Sidney Hall Jr., owner of Hobblebush Books has released Fumbling In The Light. Read the World Class Poetry review here.

Pilibosian writes well-crafted technical, if there is such a term, Postmodern poetry. The biggest problem I have with it is that it is “too” Postmodern. I think her poems could stand to be little more formal, considering the subject matter. But you’ll have to read my full review.

After reading Itinerary, however, I’m going to have to make a point to invest in more of the poetry of Reginald Shepherd. I sing my praises loudly.

I like Shepherd’s poetry for several reasons. No. 1, it’s intelligent. Shepherd writes about things that most poets can’t even dream about. He writes loves poems, but they aren’t sappy. He writes nature poems, but they don’t look like a fifth grader wrote them. There’s no “ode to the little brown leaf amid a cluster of yellows” or “may I kiss your sweet hand, my dear, it reminds me of sasparilla” type of sentimentalism that would make a Victorian nun puke in the chancel. And, yes, I’m aware that sasparilla is correctly spelled sarsaparilla, but the average poet wouldn’t have the good sense to Google it and correct the deficiency. Of course, Reginald Shepherd was no average poet.

I like Shepherd for other reasons as well. I can think of no better evidence than Itinerary that New Formalists are full of shit. Shepherd has that rare knack of being able to incorporate traditional poetic elements into non-traditional forms and tropes and making them look like Cindarella’s glass slipper. They fit. And, what’s more, you hardly notice them until, like that street sign, you’ve whizzed by them going slightly over the speed limit. Reginald Shepherd’s poetry is poetry that every poet in the 21st century should study.

This is poetry that I surmise Ron Silliman would call post-avant. It isn’t strictly avant-garde, but it isn’t traditional either. It’s somewhere in between, and from what I’ve gathered by reading Shepherd’s own blog, it’s the way he saw himself. It’s also one of the reasons I like it.

Shepherd’s Brass Tacks
OK, let’s get into some specifics. The poems in Shepherd’s chapbook Itinerary are written like Postmodern ditties, except that they make sense. He’s got a great ear for the music of a poem while rhyme in his hands is like a carefully tuned Greek instrument. Shepherd weaves alliteration, assonance, consonance, near rhyme, internal rhyme, and other melodies into a tapestry of pagan song like an Orphean choir.

The first line of the first poem in Itinerary, “Refrain”, begins

A state becomes a statement,

Simple. Brief. Obvious. But uncommon. And that’s the beauty of a Shepherd line. He takes a simple word and compares or contrasts it linguistically with another simple word that looks or sounds the same and makes good English sense out of them. Unlike the avant gardeists, who love to play with words until they are not recognizable, Shepherd twitters until the unrecognizable makes sense again. And he does it while using traditional poetic talents without falling over into the excesses of New Formalism: It’s OK to drink from the bottle, but don’t become an alcoholic. Shepherd, far from a teetotaler has shown us that hard liquor can be swallowed pure without leading us into pornographic drunkenness.

His words are full of the beauties of music all over. More examples:

Petrarch doesn’t dream of snow, except
in silver bowls with syrup
mixed into it, pomegranate or persimmon
chasing summer somewhere next to lost,

I just love that “summer somewhere.” It’s one of those obvious internal rhymes that average poets can never make happen. And then Shepherd dresses it up with the assonance of “chasing” preceding his summer. It’s like dropping a tiny dot of lace on an already beautiful dress and watching it move from gold to platinum without visible movement of the beauty barometer needle.

Then there’s

worn-down words, a kind of drown
and drench and quench and very kind
to what I would’ve said.

This is what the Postmodernists have been trying to do for decades – to write as if speaking in plain language – but Shepherd does it poetically, which is what the Postmodernists have failed at. Language is the tool of poetic arts, but too many poets have taken the poetry out of art. Shepherd put it back in.

One of my favorite lines in Itinerary comes from the final poem in the chapbook, “You, Therefore,”

from its earthwards journeys, here where there is

The tripleted internal rhyme with the words “here”, “where,” and “there”, seemingly insignificant words of our language, magnify the smallness of relational love and suddenly these three words become the most significant words of all. Huge!

The poem begins:

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:

And I couldn’t help upon reading that line to think how ironic it is that my first reading of it would be just days after Shepherd’s own exit. That might make some among us believe that the poem would have no particular significance if not for that fact, but they’d be wrong. “You, Therefore” is a masterpiece of language. Here it is in its entirety:

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries, spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy mooonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journey, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name

This is a brilliant fucking poem. Shepherd’s genius shines no brighter anywhere than in these lines. There is no end, no final punctuation to the one sentence that encapsulates this love letter. It is beyond significant that the final line does not close. It implies that the thought continues, which is fitting given the first line of the poem.

“You are like me, you will die too, but not today:”

Is he talking to his lover or the poem? Does he mean the poem will die, but not today? Perhaps both. But the best poems are those poems that remind of us our mortality while leaving open the subject of immortality and this poem has reached that pinnacle. From the very first line to the last, there is no death to the thought, to the sentence, to the poem itself.

But it is more than no mere end, no period. The poem is moved forward not by its lack of punctuation, but by its expert execution of it. The poem has six colons, but not a single solitary period. Not even a semicolon. But six colons. Six “pay attentions, what follows is incredible”.

From colon to colon, as I read this poem, I have one thought: Lead me. And like a mesmerized lover, I want to go where ever it is that Shepherd wants me to go. I trust him. And the reason I trust him is because he is a master of the language. It does not, like an unruly child, control the mother; the mother controls the child. And Shepherd shows that he is in complete control. That’s why I like him.

What I Don’t Like About Shepherd’s Itinerary
This will be short. Itinerary is one of the best poetry chapbooks I have read in a while. Shepherd keeps his language fresh, bombarding me with images that I can’t find anywhere else, but he does it in such a way that traditional poetics are not abandoned.

There isn’t much not to like in Reginald Shepherd’s Itinerary. His references to Petrarch are a bit too much. My instinct is that “Petrarch” is a pet name for his lover. And that’s fine. It adds character to the work. But I was hoping for a little bit more diversity in allusion. On the other hand, if Shepherd had satisfied my selfishness there, Itinerary might not be as spectacular as it is.

There really are no weak poems in Itinerary. There are weaker poems, but that’s like saying Superboy is slightly weaker than Superman. He’s still stronger than you.

Caveat: After composing this blog post I discovered that Reginald Shepherd’s friend Robert Philen has been posting to Shepherd’s blog. He says “You, Therefore” is “the one I’ve seen most used as part of the many online tributes to Reginald that have been put up since his death.” It seems I am not the only one who has been taken in by the colons.