Stacy Doris, _Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book_

I PICKED THIS up because of intriguing excerpts in Swenson & St. John's American Hybrid. It was as intriguing as a whole as it was in part, but it's hard to describe.

In a prefatory note, Doris herself describes the book as "a sort of sandwich-translation read-through of four books: Popul Vuh, Paterson, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the Secret Autobiographies of Jigme Lingpa." So... suppose you are reading something from an ancient civilization quite remote from your own, and recall that feeling one often has in reading such texts, that sense of missing something, that feeling that even though the words have been translated into your own language, some necessary contextual framing is unavailable to you, there are frequencies humming in the work that you can sense but not really hear. Imagine there are illustrations brought in from the original text, that seem to bear some relation to it, but again, what exactly are they illustrating, why in this way? Would the illustrations explain all if we knew what we were looking at?

So, imagine that sense of fascinated bafflement, understanding something of what you are reading, but being aware of likely missing more, and not being wholly confident that you really understood anything at all.

OK. Now imagine a text produced by our own culture that could conceivably create that same feeling in someone for whom our civilization is ancient and remote.

And now imagine a text that will give us here and now that feeling of bewilderment that our present cultural products will someday create in that reader for whom our culture is ancient and remote. Good? That text is Cheerleader's Guide to the World: Council Book.

The poems are uttered by (I think) the collective consciousness of the cheerleaders as they ponder the activities of the football players and the coaches. The poems are paratactic, disjunctive, elusive, but with an occasional startling lyricism ("Molten so praised bottle / bent to sand congratulations. / An improved carnage") -- quite a bit like reading a conscientiously literal translation of an unseizable ancient text.

Accompanying most of the poems are diagrams of American football plays (drawn by Bill Baker). Do these comment on the poems somehow, or vice versa? Are these the plays to which the cheerleaders are reacting? In any case, they are not at all self-explanatory, their relation to the text unguessable, swirling us again into that strangely satisfying limbo of confronting something decipherable which we lack the means to decipher.

Finally, allegory may be at work. The book reflects Doris's interest in "Money-Love-Writing," Doris says in her note, leading me to wonder if the cheerleaders represent writers -- Pindar was a cheerleader, she notes, his odes dedicated to celebrating the achievements of Olympic athletes -- while the football players represent those executing the fly patterns and end sweeps of capitalism, arcane to outsiders, overseen by the coaches of the Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, et alia? And then who loves whom in this allegory -- or is getting screwed by whom?

Yeah! Lose to win!

Scatter yourselves!

Bloodspill depicts

the reason for life.

Rain's made of it.

Go quench your thirst.

I wouldn't bet the farm on my allegorical interpretation, to tell you the truth, but it hovered in the back of my mind nonetheless as I read this utterly unique book.

Chris Bachelder, _Abbott Awaits_

THIS, TOO, I reviewed elsewhere, although it will likely be a while before the review sees the light of day, so rather than go into matters in detail I will confine myself to an observation and a question.

The observation: what a fine, fulfilling, complete book this is, confirming Bachelder's status as one of my favorite young contemporary novelists.

The question: so why is it this guy is being published by a university press? LSU Press has a reputation for publishing excellent fiction (e.g., Confederacy of Dunces), and a lot of university presses do a nice job of promoting the fiction they publish (e.g., U. of Nebraska), but still...! This is Bachelder's third novel, all three have been original, intelligent, funny, and moving, but apparently commercial publishers are not (as justice would require) beating down his door, even though he's every bit as or more interesting than -- well, let's say Claire Messud, or Jonathan Safran Foer, or Nicole Krauss, or Joshua Ferris, or any number of folks who books lie in stacks at my local Barnes & Noble, get ads in the NYTBR, get shortlisted for prizes, and so and so forth. It's an old, old story, I know, but the older I get the more I resent it.

Butler, _There Is No Year_

I WROTE SOMETHING about this that is eventually to appear in another venue, so I will here content myself with saying the novel lives up to its anticipatory buzz -- which is saying much. It really does turn out to be as strong as it was said to be (in contradistinction to, I would say, Freedom).

According to an interview I found on an internet trawl, Butler decided to write fiction after discovering Infinite Jest, and Wallace's death is noted in the novel at about its midpoint, at the end of Part Two. This seems fitting to me. I haven't encountered a novel by a young writer this original, this ambitious, and this rich since I picked up Infinite Jest, going on fifteen years ago.

In that same internet trawl, I saw a couple of references to the book being perhaps indebted to Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. Urkgkh. I think not. Yes, there are the same use of unusual typographical and other design elements and the same conceit of a house capable of gaming the rules of time and space. But House of Leaves is a sophisticated horror tale, I would say. I gave up about p. 250, I think, because the prose is simply too gaseous to tolerate.

An argument could be made, I grant, that since Zampanó is writing an academic treatise with generous slabs of quotations from other academics, his prose needs to be as stiff and dry as cardboard, as Johnny Truant's needs to have a stoner's vagueness and looseness. But this translates into hundreds of pages of bad writing.

The prose in This Is No Year is lean, feral, cold, almost merciless. It remains austere even when creating its most outlandish, sensational effects. It is built to last.

Mark Levine, _The Wilds_

THIS ONE MAKES Enola Gay feel a bit sophomore-slumpish in retrospect; one wouldn't call it a "return to form" or anything like that, but it has an integrity and energy that Enola Gay didn't quite have, and I expect it to stay with me longer.

Made me think of -- of all people -- Dylan Thomas. It must be fifty years or so since any American poet would welcome being compared to Dylan Thomas, but I have a soft spot for him.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, a cock on his shoulder, it was all

Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

The sky gathered again

And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

That's from "Fern Hill." What with the dew and the maiden and the "wanderer white," the poem does not sound much like anyone writing today, and certainly not like Levine, but --

When you were in possession

of the pods and pens and octagonal plots

and your grappling hooks clattered in summer wind

and you loosed the bitter petal

-- that's from "Hand," and something, the idea of a memory vaguely rural, of a paradise which was lost, or just "summer" (as in "boys of...") rang a Thomas bell for me. Above all, there is a feeling for childhood being paradoxically very near and very far away at the same time ("more distant than stars and nearer than the eye," as Eliot wrote) in "Hand, " "Ontario," "Quarry," and "Grade Three."

Hard to think of anyone who renders being outdoors better than Levine:

We were there yet

sizing up the scenery

through the spokes of

the one wheel moving

this way, the other

that. There were four

corners of us promenading

in the sensation of

walking boots. The countryside

yielded a desert flower

on which a bee

reeled in the rain.

A mill wheel spun.

This was a place

we were in it

in sensation going there.

("Belongings")

But it's complicated -- there is a gulf between the human and the wild, even if you're as attuned as Levine, as the final poem, "Willow," seems to suggest:

You take it in or you don't

You hide the sky or else.

Things lived in you.

You, stranger.

Michael Earl Craig, _Thin Kimono_

HIS THIRD BOOK, but the first I've read. Grounded, plain-spoken, drily funny -- in some ways, not the kind of book I expect from Wave Books. I do enjoy Wave Books and I did enjoy Thin Kimono, you understand -- it's just that they occupy what seem to me different points in the spectrum. So no offense to anyone, OK? OK.

Not that Craig is incapable of the kind of legerdemain that is one of the characteristics of Wave Books. "Diana" is a 6-page poem all but entirely composed of lines from Diana, a 1927 novel by Vida Hurst. Judging from what we get, Diana was a fairly ordinary novel about the reckless and feckless privileged types in the 20s, and the poem has something of the fizzy, heady quality of watching a two-hour Gloria Swanson melodrama that has been edited down to eight minutes. At one point in both novel and poem, Diana "dropped her clothes to floor, wrapped a thin kimono about her aching body and threw herself on the bed"-- hence the title.

And what a great title! It's half of the reason why I bought the book. (Plus one-quarter its being short-listed by The Believer for poetry volume of the year and one-quarter Craig's giving a reading in the town where I live.)

Another particularly intriguing part of the book is the 18 8-line poems that constitute Part II of the book. Craig did not intend them to constitute a whole -- I know because I took the trouble to ask him -- but the consistent form, the grouping of them together as a section without titles, and a sustained, wry observational humor nonetheless make the eighteen poems feel like they belong together, that they are having a kind of indirect conversation among themselves, with more than a few loose ends, true, but enjoying each other's company. Here too, as in Doller's Dead Ahead, one might detect a Muldoonian note or two:

He said she was like a gorge to him.

How so? she said.

He didn't say. She said something

to rhyme with meconium and

turned, and walked away.

He had a Pernod on the coaster before him

The seals were indeed in the harbor,

floating queerly like rockets.

Julia Holmes, _Meeks_

A BRILLIANT SHORT novel, hard to categorize. The only comparison that comes to mind is with Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, set in a wholly imaginary place, but with the texture of realism rather than fantasy, while still being loosely enough attached to reality to sustain a parable-like quality. An auspicious debut, that's for sure.

Most of the book is devoted to two characters, Ben and Meeks -- Ben a young, single man whose parents are both dead and who is without visible means of support, Meeks a homeless man of indeterminate age who is under the impression that he is a police officer. Ben's sections are narrated in the third person from Ben's POV, Meeks's in the first person.

For most of the book, one's readerly attention is less absorbed by the situations of Ben and Meeks than by the task of figuring out how the society they imhabit works. As a "bachelor," Ben lives in a special rooming house, and needs a pale suit -- he has only a black one, thus is excluded from "Listening Parties," his best bet for finding a woman to marry. If he does not find a woman to marry by "Independence Day," this community's big September commemoration of its founding by Captain Meeks, he will have to put on a gray suit and become a manual laborer. Meeks (named for the captain, we suppose), known to the community as the crazy man who sleeps in the park, is not a player in this high-stakes marriage market but has worries of his own, e.g., being carted off to parts unspecified by the "Brothers of Mercy."

Holmes gradually reveals that Captain Meeks founded the community on two principles, that communities endure because they are united by a threat and because social norms are rigorously conformed to. Thus we have the "Enemy," in the unending war against whom Ben's father died, the stringent duty to marry or toil for those who have, and the sacrifice which (we at length learn) forms the central act of Independence Day observances.

All too accurate an allegorical analogue, methinks, to the Bush II years. The elements are familiar -- we have a bit of M. Night Shymalan's Village (as read by Zizek), a bit of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," a bit of Auden's "Horae Canonicae" even (as Girard might read it) -- but at the same time the book has its own atmosphere, mainly due to Holmes's fresh and precise prose. One of Ben's memories:

He smelled the narrow, speckled fish cooking, spiked on sharpened sticks stabbed deep into the sand beside small fires, blazes of yellow-orange flower. Beached jellyfish were thick lenses on the sand. His mother brought him a mango; he peeled away the skin inexpertly; he bit into the sweet sherbet-colored fruit; he scraped the hard pit with his teeth. He buried the pit in the sand and rinsed his hands in the seawater. He followed the paranoid, supercilious crabs from wet rock to wet rock. He stared down the long, narrow, speckled fish that gathered in the tidal pools when the tide went out, the fish all facing forward dourly like parishioners in the cool cathedral space between the jetty rocks.

Holmes's ability to animate such moments ensures that the parable unfolds without a dull page.

Ben Doller, _Dead Ahead_

HERE I WAS just writing that I have detected little of Paul Muldoon's influence among younger American poets (younger, that is, than I -- an alarmingly numerous class these days), and then the final poem in Doller's new volume not only rhymes ingeniously (e.g., adjacent/patient) and breaks at one point into sonnet form, but uses the peculiarly Muldoonian trick of using the last line of a section of a long poem to begin the next section.

The poem, "Period Style," is one of three excellent longer poems in the book, along with "Prescription Window"and "The Widow Ching Poems," and the three are strikingly different. "Prescription Window" alternates long lines and short lines while also alternating left justification and right justification to original and intriguing effect, and the Widow Ching sequence handles the theme of love well, and we can always use more of those.

Shall I sing

(I rarely sing)

of the patina

of promotion

the name unlike the name

that going

(everywhere)

you gave

green

the promotion

that came relinquishing the fleet

The Lustre of True Instruction

Lovely, no? A little like Cummings filtered through Pound's Cathay.

Since Doller's last book, FAQ (see LLL, January 2010), was a programmatic work with fairly exacting constraints, Dead Ahead was bound to be more formally and tonally various, but I'm happy to see it's even more formally and tonally various than it had any need to be. Doller is now three-for-three in my book, definitely on my List of Reliables.