THIS IS SO unlike The After Party that I would not have guessed it was by the same writer. It’s not better, not worse, but definitely different.
The After Party was cosmopolitan, with poems set in many different places; apart from a couple or so poems set in Dublin, No Matter sticks closely to New York City. The After Party ranged widely through history, but the poems in No Matter more often describe someone or something the poet seemed to have seen that day.
The After Party foregrounded erudition and technique, poems about reading Barthes, ekphrastic poems, an ambitious long closing poem. There is a lot of craft in No Matter What, if you look closely, but on first impression the poems often have the quick-take immediacy of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.
Nor is there anything in The After Party quite like the tart elegy for Robert Silvers, “Bob”:
Listen, he would start
when driven once again
to issue a rebuke,
listen, I’d stiffen,
listen—
First book though it was, The After Party seemed so much the end of a long line of development, so matured a voice, that I was thinking of it as one of those debut volumes in which a poet seems to have already achieved their distinctive style, like Stevens’s Harmonium or Moore’s Observations. But she had another voice up her sleeve the whole time. What next?
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