Ocean Vuong, _Night Sky with Exit Wounds_

MY LATEST POETRY Week is over, but I still have a stack of poetry collections about the height of a four-year-old child, so I should read at least a few more of them, don't you think?

This one received some acclaim on its appearance in 2016--less attention than Vuong's new autofiction/memoir (which shares a title with one of the poems herein), but the comparison is perhaps invidious.

It's a dazzling collection, and a little disturbing, too, as the erotic and the violent are often adjacent. The Vietnam War and its effects on Vuong's parents and grandparents loom in the background; his father in particular seems traumatized and frequently absent, an experience refracted through a pattern of Odyssey allusions.

The poems do not yield meaning readily, though. "Eurydyce" begins:

It's more like the sound
     a doe makes
when the arrowhead
     replaces the day
with an answer
     to the rib's hollowed
 hum.

I'm not sure I know what sound a doe makes in those circumstances, but I worry about that arrowhead. We meet the doe again in "The Smallest Measure," when a boy on his first hunting trip ("the Winchester rattles / in a boy's early hands") spots her and is told by the "copper beard" at his ear, "Go ahead, the voice thicker / now, drive her / home."

Is our Orpheus capable of violence? Is that why "Queen Under the Hill" (Venus, wasn't it?), a poem that alludes to Duncan's "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," turns into a nightmare in which a piano morphs into a dead horse? Did some kind of violence, perhaps wholly imaginary, prompt the confessions in "Anaphora as Coping Mechanism" or "Prayer for the Newly Damned"? If the suggestion of Rilke's archaic torso of Apollo is taken up--"Suppose you do change your life," proposes "Torso of Air"--will the peace promised in "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" come to pass?

I have more questions than answers.  Good book, though.