Jennifer Moxley, _Druthers_

 WHY DO I like Jennifer Moxley's poetry so much? I suspect it is her deftness with traditional elements of poetry (rhyme, meter, complex sentence structures) being unblended with any starchy cultural politics. She is willing to risk elegance, but without any defense-of-civilization posing. 

She ought to be more famous than she is.  "Druthers (4)" and "On Her Success" suggest she is well aware of this circumstance, but final poem "The Spark" banishes regret.

"The Honest Cook's Insomnia" is about cooking, but it often sounds like it is about writing, Moxley's writing at least, and captures much of what I find appealing about her poems.

            Do  not try to please
"the crowd." It is better to
risk accusations of exclusivity
and stay honest to your vision,
than to go hungry cooking for those
whose tastes you do not share.
[...]
Beware of trends and fashions,
yet open to new techniques.
[...]
Learn from the masters. This is true
for amateurs especially, so often
exiled to the flimsy techniques
of the present day.
[...]
               However
much of an innovator you imagine
yourself to be, your time's tastes will
express themselves through you,
and cooks who come after will
scratch their heads.
[...]
Taste, like experience, feels individual
but is more often than not shared.

I hope the "neural plaques and tangles" mentioned  near the end of "The Spark" are hypothetical, as I am hoping to add some volumes to my Moxley shelf.

Richard Russo, _Bridge of Sighs_

 THIS IS THE fourth Russo novel I have read. All but one (Straight Man) were set in an upstate New York down in a gradual downward spiral, and four centered on a flawed but well-meaning man trying to pull together something redemptive from an accumulation of questionable decisions and missed opportunities. On that level, they all might be the same novel--but you can level the same charge at Jane Austen (young woman has to distinguish, without a lot of help from friends or family, Mr. Seems-Right-at-First from Mr. Truly-Right), which goes to show that a novelist can keep writing what is in the abstract the very same novel, yet continue to come up books worth reading.

In brief, Bridge of Sighs is characteristically Russo-esque in setting, character, and story, and be it because of or despite that, I liked it a lot.

Lou C. Lynch, known to most of the town of Thomaston as Lucy, narrates most of the novel, giving us a lot of background about his family, the town, his marriage to his high school girlfriend, Sarah, and his childhood friendship with Bobby Marconi, who has gone on to become Robert Noonan, an internationally recognized painter who now lives in Venice. Lucy is writing his memoirs at the same time that he and Sarah are planning a retirement trip to Italy, which is to include a stop in Venice to renew acquaintance with Bobby/Robert.

Russo steps out of Lucy's narration occasionally, though, with chapters from the points of view of Robert and Sarah, from which we gather that the two-couple high school friendship that defined their senior year--Lucy and Sarah, Bobby and prettiest girl in town Bev--trembled with the tension of a mutual attraction between Sarah and Bobby.

All the plans for visiting Venice, accordingly, are charged with the emotions of roads not taken, and we get a kind of retrospective reconstruction of a Jane Austen novel, with Sarah as the young woman who must distinguish, without much help from friends or family, Mr. Seems-Right from Mr. Truly-Right. We know from early on whom she chose--what unfolds for us is the question of whether she chose well. 

This is a generous novel, so there is a lot more alongside this central story: attention to how racial difference mattered in Thomaston, to families functional and dys-, to what the 1960s felt like if you were a teenager. One of my favorite chapters, even though its role in the plot was slight, was an analysis of what junior high dances of the era felt like. 

Russo is no minimalist, and a lot of readers may feel we could have used a bit less of this or a little less of that. But if you can appreciate some old-fashioned Victorian amplitude in contemporary fiction, Russo is your man.

John Murillo, _Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry_

 EVEN BETTER THAN his first book (Up Jumped the Boogie). This one too deals often with the rougher precincts of urban life in street-inflected language, but at the same time shows extraordinary formal control and familiarity with the traditions of English verse. 

This book includes the poem (or poems) that got my attention in the 2020 Best American Poetry, "A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn." The title is a tip of the hat to Dylan Thomas, which is nice, but the astonishing thing is that Murillo pulls off a crown of sonnets, moreover a heroic crown of sonnets, while digging down into one of the most painful and urgent problems of our time and place, state violence against the Black community. 

The volume also includes "On Confessionalism" and "Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Kinds of Birds,"likewise published in the BAP series (2019 and 2017, respectively). Both show how skillful Murillo is at taking an idea for a walk into some surprising places, a more compressed David Antin.

The penultimate poem, "On Prosody" manages to encompass Emerson and Frost while telling a terrible but all too credible story of how things were in Murillo's childhood neighborhood, and then ends with a sonnet that is a re-mix of a Notorious B.I.G. lyric but also a sort of apologia pro vita sua. 

How does he do it?

I also find myself also wondering...how old is he? Gray in the beard, so past 45, I guess, making it a surprise that Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is only his second book. There is not a dud poem in here, however, so maybe it's just a question of quality control.

Tracy K. Smith & David Lehmann, eds., _The Best American Poetry 2021_

 MY AMBITION EVERY year is to get BAP read before the next BAP appears, and every year I fail. My secondary ambition is to read it before the calendar year ends, and this year I made it, on December 31.

It's a good BAP. It checks my top two personal BAP boxes. 

1. The poetry does not all sound a lot like the year's editor's work. Check!

2. A good mix of old hands and new names. Check! Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, and Stanley Moss on the one hand, Su Cho, Adam O. Davis, Emily Lee Luan, Hannah Marshall, and Angbeen Saleem, Darius Simpson, and Monica Sok on the other.

Since a lot of the poetry herein was published in 2021, a good deal of it was likely written in 2020, and accordingly George Floyd is a presence, sometimes named (as in Terrance Hayes's "George Floyd"), sometimes not (as in Ed Roberson's "Air"). Traces of the pandemic linger as well, but the state and other violence visited on Black bodies is the volume's strongest undercurrent.

By my count, this is the fourth BAP to end with a Kevin Young poem. I wonder what the record is? Dean Young, may his memory be for a blessing, must have had quite a few. Besides his four anchor spots, Kevin Young has three appearances just ahead of Matthew Zapruder. 

Sadie Dupuis, _Cry Perfume_, and David Berman, _Actual Air_

 AS WITH OPTIC Subwoof, I reviewed Cry Perfume elsewhere--although that review I don't think has actually appeared yet--and as with Optic Subwoof I'm still thinking about matters I treated with careful circumspection in the review.

To wit: aren't books of poetry by songwriters better avoided, when you get right down to it? I mean...Billy Corgan? Jewel? Even Jeff Tweedy? Even the absolute greats? Jim Morrison's The Lords and the New Creatures and Dylan's Tarantula did not exactly...add to their stature.

Dupuis is a great songwriter (for indie outfit Speedy Ortiz--also main vocalist and guitarist), but that guarantees nothing. Tweedy is a great songwriter, but his poems were not that interesting. Yet Dupuis's book is good--consistently readable with several gems. And brought out by Black Ocean, no less. Definitely the real thing.

Still you wonder. Can you be on both paths? We might cite Patti Smith and Leonard Cohen...but even in cases like that one wonders how compelling readers would find the poetry if it lacked the aura the two of them possess as performers. Speedy Ortiz is not on the glamour train--maybe more like last-gasp vans headed down the highway to do shows in basement clubs, sleeping on couches, not showering for a week--but still, being in a band has more aura than any AWP conference. Can Dupuis achieve any kind of recognition as a writer that has nothing to do with her fronting Speedy Ortiz?

But maybe things are changing. As patron saint of what may be an emerging new world in which songwriters and poets are all one big happy is occasionally dysfunctional family, let me nominate the late David Berman. Not only were his songs with the Silver Jews and Purple Mountains brilliant and brilliantly performed, but his only book of poems, Actual Air, still delights after all this time (first published in 1999). Berman's poems do not much remind me of his songs, which tend to rhyme and to comment on Berman's own personal circumstances more often the poems do. The poems come from something more like a James Tate world, or the world of Donald Barthelme's early stories, sad and hilarious, immediately recognizable and utterly strange. He's a great songwriter and a great poet. Maybe Dupuis too is one of the early instances of a new breed.