Lucie Brock-Broido, _Trouble in Mind_

IF I WAS asked to recommend a Brock-Broido volume, I would probably go with The Master Letters, a bravura performance that shows her range and ambition. I have been wondering, though, whether Stay, Illusion might be her best, really, confident of its power, a foundation-trembling Bach organ performance. My favorite, even so, is this one.

It's intriguing, for one thing. Why the cover with a detail of the same painting that she used for the cover of her first book? Why the title reference to a famous old blues song? (Brock-Broido's cultural reference points tended to skew high rather than popular.)

For another thing, it's intense. "I" occurs in almost every poem, and the "I" has a coherence and consistency over the book that feels confessional even though nothing very specific is revealed. The second person comes up, too, in some very arresting ways:

     For a poem to be true, it must "come from an Ever."
If you don't fathom that, then you should not be reading this.

I wasn't sure I did fathom that, actually (it's from Stevens it turns out), but I kept reading, and I was soon found out, shortly after Brock-Broido dropped in a glancing reference to the West Bank:

     You did not dream I held political
Ideals, did you. [She was right, I did not.] You should not be reading this and are.

What is it about this book? Imagine a Victorian collection of fairy tales, tending to the disturbing end of Hans Christian Anderson, say ("Little Mermaid," "The Red Shoes," "The Snow Queen"), in an ornate edition with hand-colored illustrations under tissue paper, elegant but just a little frightening, the sort of thing Edward Gorey would keep on a special shelf. Then imagine that that book had a child with The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.  Trouble in Mind is a bit like that.

Something terrible and searing has happened, something on the order of Dickinson's "I never lost as much but twice," some erasure, separation, I don't know what. Dickinson does not seem ever very far away in Brock-Broido; "The Deerhunting" seems like a recasting of "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun," for example. Brock-Broido does not go in for Dickinson austerity, the whitewashed walls in winter light--she likes her jewels and embroidery--but she can drop you in the abyss the way Dickinson does.

Like a madrigal, a pastoral
In the pocket of my houndstooth vest,

You are the only beauty in this
Celestial torture I will call my own.