Solmaz Sharif, _Customs_

SHARIF'S SECOND COLLECTION is tougher, sharper, and generally more impressive than her already impressive first collection, Look. She stands in serious jeopardy of winning a big prize, I suspect, a prospect that might not even please her that much, given the disillusioned view of the poetry world on offer in "Patronage":

Poets convinced they are ringmaster

when it is with big brooms and bins, in fact,

they enter to clear the elephant scat.

The gap between the prestige attached to poetry and its lack of power to accomplish anything in particular--the irony that one can win lucrative prizes for doing it well even though it "makes nothing happen"--is just one of the abysses the book stares into it. There is also the gap between Sharif's having grown up in the United States and gone on to live and work here while being routinely perceived as a foreign presence. But when she visits her mother's hometown in Iran, she is not "of" that place either: "A without which / I have learned to be." "Without Which" is the name of one of the two long poems that anchor the book, and it formally enacts the sense of incompleteness through spatial gaps where sections of the poem seem to have gone missing. 

Sharif can be satirically funny about this sense of incompleteness, as in "Self Care," a list of all the commodities one can buy to remedy that feeling of lack: 

Have you tried

rose hydrosol? Smoky quartz

in a steel bottle

of glacial water? Tincture

drawn from the stamens

of daylilies grown

on the western sides

of two-story homes?

Pancreas of toad?

Deodorant paste?

Have you removed

your metal fillings?

The lack may be the work of patriarchy, as suggested by "The Master's House," or estrangement from might have been one's sources, as suggested in Sharif's poem on not translating Forough Farrokhzad ("Into English"), or the general public's obtuseness about poetry ("He, Too"). It resists naming. It isn't going anywhere.

Yet the cloud lifts towards the end of the book's second long poem, "An Otherwise." In defiance of Lear's declaration that "nothing will come of nothing," does Sharif find that absence can be constructive? Or maybe it was as simple as deciding to keep her fillings:

I knew not the poem, only the weather.

I knew not the listening, only this landscape, its one clear channel.

The metal in my teeth caught its frequency.

The iron shavings of my blood pulled towards this otherwise.