David Trinidad, _Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems_, (2 of 2)

 THE "SELECTED" SECTION of this generous (almost 500 pages) "new and selected" collection has its own title, "Dear Prudence," and the poems are arranged in chronological order, each with the year of composition noted--a very satisfactory way to proceed, I thought. 

Trinidad's books started appearing in the 1980s, when he was in his later twenties and earlier thirties. I don't remember exactly what new poets I was reading at the time, but I wish I had been reading Trinidad instead. "The New Formalism" was getting attention at the time, and I must have read some of that, but none of it has stuck with me; Trinidad's "Playing with Dolls," however, a sestina about being a boy playing with Barbies, would definitely have made me a fan for life. 

I could say the same for "Fluff," with its syllabic verse about a short-lived addition to the Barbie line, or "Monster Mash," a catalog of movie monsters in a Shakespearean sonnet, or "Chatty Cathy Villanelle," or the quatrains of "Evening Twilight," or the terza rima of "Garbo's Trolls," or the list of early 1960s top 40 hits in "In My Room," or "Every Night, Byron!", a long poem from the point of view of Trinidad's dog, its title a nod to Jacqueline Susann. 

And I may as well mention Trinidad's extended pantoum about the Bette Davis film "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" and its epigones (which Trinidad titles "Hack, Hack, Sweet Has-Been," which was the title of Mad magazine's parody of "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte"--I remember it well). 

Trinidad has a near-Wildean genius for treating trivial things seriously and serious things with a sincere and studied triviality. If that doesn't sound like your sort of thing, well, there's always Robinson Jeffers.

The high point for me was "A Poem Under the Influence," about fifty pages long and under the influence, I am going to guess, of James Schuyler. Schuyler was one of the American poets who figured out how to be modern without being a Modernist, and the whole of contemporary American poetry is in his debt. Trinidad's is a fitting tribute.