The Fire

Steven Manuel gives us back the elegiac. He gives us back the music that left Anglophone poetry in the post-Modern Seventies. Take this title and dedication: A CHILD’S GARDEN / for Ronald Johnson, / Stan Brakhage, / & Joey Ramone – it pretty much sets out the range of prosody in this book. Not since Pound’s Cantos have we heard poems with such an embroidered match between melody and content. Ingenious, yet for all their passionate knowing, they enchant with a quirky vocabulary and mid-century brevity. There’s always another sparse Mother Goose stanza about to emerge. Witty and thorny, allusive scraps of classic authors, tangents, songs overheard. These spry, erudite lines hurry right along festina lente. Birds carol generation; poplar habitations; eyries; eggs; the new mounting of a day’s Icarian isolations. —Thomas Meyer