I'd like to interpolate a word of praise for a non-prynneclone here.
Forrest Gander's new book, <Science and Steepleflower> is just out from New
Directions (Penguin in Canada) at $12.95. It's a wonderful book, by some
way FG's best yet, which I would recommend to anyone who wants to see
what's happening in American poetry that is not mainstream, is not academic
and is not influenced by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E practices etc. For me this stands
along side Peter Cole's <Hymns and Qualms> and the new book by Lee Harwood
as Significant Moments of the year - until of course the Collected Prynne
appears ...

I quote a couple of poems that I like, lifted at random:

Coda [to Eggplants and Lotus Root]
----------------------------------------------------

and the birds: canthi loosed at a distance. Aqua-
marine backdrop, scratched out several. All symbols
buried in the sand. Nor a cardinal's color nor point, so
only smooth and hush come clear. Unfocused and as if
winked upon. Where the wind, dehiscing sand, does not
omit. In a synoptic way, surrounded: already the eye
whose perceptible tearing: "how the rain swung from
the rims of." Even if it is possible to remain noncommittal
about an endpoint. Winter, thumbprint of black birds
smudged across windshield, in a premature language.
An ocean.

[last 2 words in italics]


&

Garment of Light
------------------------
For two figures preserved at Pompeii

Before the hand stretches out to intensify time's discipline,
it accumulates a thickness, accretionary lapilli.
Horseshoe-shaped calderas gape toward the sea.
The bridge begins
as an open chord. In the mountains, falls
are magmatic and subtle.
He does not know where to guide her eyes.

Before gigantic blocks shift
and transform into avalanche, before swifts mute
warm dung in their eyes:
small phreatomagnetic or scoriaceous or small
phreatic explosions, heavy ashfall and darkness for several days.

Where does she hide, now, his nervous, strange exhilaration?
When 3 is the tertiary slope and 6 is the crater rim?
How do they go on
chewing words like crickets, if 8
is the landslide, and so is the town?
What will their children find to weigh the fire in?

At the tension beyond the opening, they unwrap their secret
voices of fine, bluish-grey pumice shards.
They, known now as conscutive numbers, following
each other to an extreme inner distance.

If lava were not derived of exigence,
the scarp might reveal a parasitic cone.
But volcanic glass hisses forth
carrying free plagioclase crystals. In quiet fumarolic
emissions, the glow faces their faces. Look,
they have scrawled
into the hatched tephra a word
half-obscured by mud
under which they lie. Our days
come tagged to that foreign
inscription, a delicate, enharmonic reply.





%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%