Review

Joe Oestreich. Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2012. 304 pp. $16.95, paper.

Getting Noticed

Joe Oestreich begins his new rock memoir Hitless Wonder with the lesson of waiting: “Wait to get noticed. Wait to get signed. Wait to get famous.” By the end of the book, however, “waiting” for Oestreich and his band Watershed takes on a different finish. As a rock memoir, Hitless Wonder rubs shoulders with rockumentaries like Anvil! The Story of Anvil and even Rob Reiner’s mockumentary This is Spinal Tap. However, Hitless Wonder plunges headlong into the ultra-gritty physical and mental terrains that come with building and sustaining a rock band primarily fueled by intangible rewards. Watershed’s doggedly loyal “superfans” often travel long distances for a show, and Oestreich never underestimates the motivating power of “drinking a lot and sleeping late and wallowing in the kind of behavior that’s frowned upon in everyday life.”

Hitless Wonder pulls back the curtain on Watershed’s struggles with everything from hunger, hangovers, and manhandling amps to long-distance relationships, negotiating record deals, and the knotty dynamics of touring into middle-age. Oestreich toggles between self-deprecating humor and transparency as he records his transition from a young, ambitious singer and bass player to an equally driven but older veteran of Watershed: “I wanted to look like Tom Petersson on the Cheap Trick In Color album cover: all hair and aviator glasses on a Fatboy chopper. But locked in the bathroom, armed with two mirrors so I could measure the full 360-degrees of my male-pattern baldness, I looked like Phil fucking Collins.” But while Oestreich jokingly longs for a rock-and-roll exterior, he also lets us see the internal workings of his ego. Standing on the streets of Manhattan after cutting a deal with Epic Records, Oestreich reflects on his desire for stardom:

I was momentarily hit with the same jealousy that had spiked the last three years as Colin, Biggie, Herb, and I watched our friends graduate from college to adult-size paychecks. My insides tightened. My mental defenses stiffened, constricting a layer of armor that shielded my ego from the sight of other people’s success. I wanted to fire back at those Brothers Brooks, at those Taylors Ann – to shout into the Manhattan morning, Listen up, you Nouveau-Yorker yuppie fucks. You should all be jealous of me.

But Oestreich undergoes a number of transformations throughout Hitless Wonder. In the bathroom of a Toledo club called Frankie’s, Oestreich confronts the reality of aging alongside an ever-morphing music scene when he recalls having Wallflower Child tattooed on his shoulder. Wallflower Child, a popular song written by Oestreich, acts as an important line to separate his style from Colin’s, Watershed’s other singer and Oestreich’s lifelong friend. However, as Oestreich ages, he looks into the mirror and sees a distorted version of his past and rock and roll: “The tattoo has faded in the sixteen years since Speck inked it, and the letters have gone blurry. It looks like it says CAULIFLOWER CHILI […] Over the sink someone has written WATERSHED ROCKS! Underneath, somebody else—surely one of the emo kids—has responded with, WHAT IS ROCK?”

Questions about Watershed’s future linger as Oestreich’s transition into writing collides with the tour near the end of the memoir. Oestreich continually explores his motivations for continuing to play in a band increasingly faced with small-scale shows, new waves of music built on “bleeping” and “blooping,” and his burgeoning career as a writer and professor. After abandoning university life as an undergraduate to pursue music, Oestreich later returns to school to expand his creativity and studio energy into an MFA in creative writing and a teaching position at Coastal Carolina University. Compared to a lifestyle of touring and performing on stage, the institutional qualities of a professorship seemingly stand in opposition to Oestreich’s identity as a musician: office hours, meetings, lectures, and conferences. And yet, we see traits of a writer and professor in Oestreich during Watershed’s recording sessions. The studio becomes a classroom where Oestreich learns to edit, to give and accept constructive criticism, and to patiently pick apart songs like an essay in order to rebuild them stronger.

By the end of Hitless Wonder, success becomes difficult to measure, and instead of waiting to get noticed, signed, and famous, Watershed relaxes into the next opportunity to pile into the van one more time and play to a loyal following. The reportage alone keeps the memoir moving steadily along through the entertaining and unpredictable gauntlet of rock and roll. Through Oestreich, we experience the unease of sleeping on the floor of a speeding van, knowing a sudden stop will result in decapitation by guitar amp. We share the thrill of big-time music producers ordering the entire left side of a menu in an upscale Manhattan restaurant. We feel the frustration of broken-down vans, unpaid shows, tightfisted bartenders, disinterested record execs, and crowds who protest by throwing batteries. We relive the experiences of too many PBRs and picking at deli trays. We wait with Watershed as fans chant “Wa-ter-shed!” And we weigh the significance of playing one crowded arena versus several modest clubs and dive bars, questioning alongside Oestreich: Is it worth it? Band members and ex-band members will surely find familiar ground in Hitless Wonder, but the memoir offers much more than minor league rock. Oestreich layers in family, his youth in the suburbs, the bond between Watershed’s members, and his relationship with his wife from day one, all while grappling with success, disappointment, and reconciling the two creative worlds of music and writing.

Zach Savich. The Firestorm. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011. 96 pp. $15.95, paper.

In keeping with its title, Zach Savich’s The Firestorm evokes a sense of uncontrollable movement. These poems are built around the sudden imposition of stray ideas—a vaunted desire for grace, for example, or the hopeful purity of eunuchs—and the ability to weave them into a poem’s structure. Whether moving from a man “running from firefighters” with “half of his face bloody” to the lyrical dissection of a doorknob, or from a friend “trying to assemble a full / deck from only cards he finds on the street” to a woman’s abortion experience, Savich’s third collection reads like a litany of wild associations, like verse that can’t dismiss anything as ancillary.

Despite all these imaginative leaps, however, the poems in this book rest upon an undercurrent of poetry as process, the sense that “all we’ve ever done is variously revise / Leaves of Grass.” Offered almost as counterpoint to the rapid-fire movement of each piece’s narrative, metaphors often tend toward the flatter end of the presentational register, even highlighting their pared down arrangement as sort of matter-of-fact observations, forgoing the simile by stating “two tomatoes on the table” simply “were a bulbous bird.”

Importantly, this penchant for objective inventory does little to disrupt the collection’s artistic pyrotechnics; rather, Savich provides just enough dissonance through catalog to accentuate bolder moments in the work. Aware of a piece’s constructed nature, yet still somehow desirous of an unnameable “truth,” Savich describes his “dream of the sublime” as:

A birdhouse of xylophone slats—
Sawn so the tiny eggs in it
Shine when Mad Vlad pumps it
Conducting traffic—captivates
Because next he could make it a bludgeon.

While perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek in their interpretations of “terrible beauty,” Savich’s poems still seem genuinely interested in experiences that dwarf human consciousness. Sometimes, these experiences appear physical and everyday, like “how the first swimmers / must have felt” after attaching a ladder to a tree. Sometimes, however, they reside in the act of writing itself.

Savich’s third collection operates under the assumption that all one can do is search, to keep moving. As Savich puts it, one may “have been told the correct usage of hopefully” but must still insist on a different interpretation. Admittedly, at times, the pyrotechnics can seem unnecessary. “Riddle,” for example—set up as a kind of mock dramatis personae for a play that doesn’t exist—might seem antagonistic, simply refusing to meet the reader halfway. Still, these moments are few and far between. Mostly, these poems stick to an unapologetically rapid pace while questioning their own internal mechanisms. In other words, Savich forgets whether he is “pulling the curtain open or closed,” trading the importance of an answer in exchange for its constant pursuit.

Gregory Fraser. Answering the Ruins. Chicago, IL: TriQuarterly Books, 2008. 76 pp. $14.95, paper.

In this powerful and fluent second book, Gregory Fraser takes on the imposing task of “answering” ruins both ancient and contemporary, from the Eternal City to Ground Zero. In doing so, Fraser demonstrates a striking ability to weave together seemingly unrelated themes and images, drawing new connections and often dropping in mythical or literary allusions in order to deepen the resonance of his poems’ subjects. The sweeping “Hephaestus Calls My Brother Home,” a heart-wrenching account of the death of the poet’s brother, as well as the poem which lends the collection its title, fully embodies Fraser’s intelligence and range. In rich, aurally pleasing language, Fraser’s poem traverses time and setting, offering Greek gods nestled in nature and hovering beside hospital beds. (Fraser’s first collection, Strange Pietà, winner of the Walt McDonald prize, introduced us to the poet’s brother Jonathan, born with spina bifida, who lived into adulthood, years beyond what his doctors had led family to expect.)

In “Poem for First Fathers,” the poet again connects distant deities to a powerful familial love: “since your child is now a ball of winter, / a miniature Mars. That’s when you want war / with that deadbeat in the heavens.” Fraser watches his child suffer an illness, railing at a deity he simultaneously doubts and despises, awed and troubled by a world where one so innocent can feel such pain. This poem, like much of the rest of the collection, expresses the poet’s distress at the state of the world and the chaos and tragedy of everyday life.

The ruins answered by these poems are not only those of crumbled stone and metal, but the shambles of what the poet views as a damaged world. Though his reference to Mars is to the planet, the mention of war reminds us that it is the Roman god’s domain; through such references, the poet draws lines that span millennia, his knowledge of the classics a substantial resource that enriches his approach to contemporary subjects.

Answering the Ruins is, at times, a response to all that is ancient, but Fraser also answers ruins closer to home, especially in the haunting “Cheat.” The poem explores the heavy guilt the speaker battles after his wife has detected and punished the plagiarism of a student who, they come to fear, was killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center. The student, whose “sense of entitlement” irritated the speaker and his wife, begins as a rule-breaker served well by justice but transforms into a poor kid who was treated, perhaps, too harshly: “He did have a pleasant smile, and was his crime / really such a disgrace? We watched the clock, / kept ears pricked over toast and coffee, // until he nearly became the son we never had, / whose memory needed tending.” More directly stated than most of Fraser’s work, this poem evokes real sorrow by linking an everyday lapse to a major historical event.

Fraser’s insights often derive from a single, ordinary moment, as in “Hold,” which, as the title suggests, deals with the modern inconvenience of being put on hold when making a phone call. Here, the poet is self-aware, conscious of how his grand, wandering thoughts may carry an understated absurdity. In skillful tercets, the speaker lingers on the word “hold” and its various meanings before ironically rejoicing at the actual human on the other end of the line: “All day, you have been bounced from Hold / to Hold, and now they’ve come at last— / the words for which you’ve waited // what seems like your whole life: / Good afternoon, this is Tina. With whom / do I have the pleasure of speaking?” Fraser finds wonder in even the most mundane of human experiences.

His frequent allusions remind us that human history repeats itself and that we can find some solace and solidarity in the fact that our tragedies are not totally unique, but are shared limitlessly across the great expanse of time and space. Fraser’s knack for crafting complex, sweeping poems in rich language makes Answering the Ruins a masterful and moving second book.

Peter Cooley. Divine Margins. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009. 72 pp. $15.95, paper.

Peter Cooley’s latest book, Divine Margins, is a series of heartfelt ruminations during and following the year his parents died. At times, the book reads as a collection of aubades, where each morning provides the terrible and wonderful chance to conjure up the luminous memories of the past, and where the morning light is the liminal space in which the dead still populate the memories of the living. As the author says to his mother,

Mother, your voice: there is no word for how it wounds me.
It comes back as that silence you picked up the phone with always,
hesitant, plangent, dawn lifting back the night.
Mother, your voice, I only have it at first light.

—“Triptych: center panel always still unfinished” (12)

It is this liminal space that Cooley haltingly enters: a parent himself, he knows that someday he too shall be in the place of his own dead parents. As he tries to orient himself following his parents’ deaths, it is his own role as a parent that he returns to as he tries to make sense of his new world. As he writes about his own impending old age,

You are the person come to clean my room,
you are whichever of my three children
open the drawer here where this poem will go
in a few minutes when I’ve had my say.

—“One Certain Thing” (63)

The world of his poems is a world in which he both reaches back to a childhood when language seemed unable to express his full desires, and it is a world which provides a plenitude that he trips over as an adult. In many of the poems, he has to move beyond language to record the world around him, relying only on their sounds and shadows. What emerges is a world in which the television blares alongside references to Shakespeare and the persons of the New Testament. Other times, the only ways of connecting with the dead are through the routine of daily life and all its details. As he tries to re-create the comfort of his childhood, he writes of a trip to the supermarket,

Cream of wheat, brown sugar, I drop them into my cart,
no one but you knowing how little I’ve become,
readers, how little I need now since Mother’s gone.
Breakfast at the beginning, supper for the end of life.

—“Little Quartet for my Mother” (19)

It is in these moments we grasp the starkness Cooley does not have the language to tackle head-on.

Caught in the margin between parents who have disappeared and a family that he has created, Peter Cooley uses this space to probe how the living deal with memory and the future. The book is divided into four sections. The first deals with the immediate aftermath of the death of both his parents. The second section moves away from the raw emotion and takes on a more meditative tone as it views his world through the lens of various archetypes and through received stories, such as religious stories, trying to make sense of what he has experienced. The third section is a short prose section that compares a visit to the zoo as an adult to one when he was a little boy. He remembers this as the time he first became a poet. The fourth section then returns, refreshed, to look once more at the deaths that have led him to write this book of poetry. In all, the arc is of one who re-emerges, from the initial trauma to its distancing, to the ability to reflect upon it and put it into art and to see this as a universal human tendency.

There are a few—precious few!—moments where Cooley pushes through to something beyond a melancholic, ruminative voice. In “All My Tests Negative” he says,

I need a miracle before I sleep tonight!
This is what I get: high noon, grace the light
standing between parked cars, the hospital parking lot,
all my tests negative, here between the black limo
trussed up to impress in milky leathers … (45)

But this energy does not last, to the book’s benefit. This is a book of endings, and a book of morning light, the voice being one of the poet looking out, barely awake, moving in grief like a person underwater and uncaffeinated. It’s a meditative journey. Poems like “All My Tests Negative” hint at moments when Cooley might turn to engage with the others living around him, but these are largely unformed moments that only exist in the right now; this book’s strengths are the length and depth with which it plumbs the numbness, disorientation, lethargy and confusion of trauma, loneliness and grief, which Cooley does marvelously.

Ryan Flaherty. What’s This, Bombardier? Warrensburg, MO: Pleiades Press, 2011. $16.95, paper.

Ryan Flaherty’s What’s This, Bombardier? takes its title from the poem “Questions of Apropos,” in which the speaker dissects the physical and metaphorical constructions of an object simply called “thing.” The identity of this “thing,” beyond the abstract label Flaherty lends it, never becomes clear, despite the numerous demands asked of it, despite even the titular and final question:

Is it a basis of intelligence or just a molecular quirk
drawing me to the edge, my fingers going numb

from holding this “thing” over the opened cargo doors,
and I am holding what, exactly, bombardier?

Throughout the collection, this “thing” defies definition. While in the above example the “thing” seems ostensibly some bomb about to be dropped, at other moments it resists even that type of implication, remaining simply “a thing-sized / ‘thing’” (“Loops to Sequester the ‘Thing’”).

Reviewing a work which deals in the dissection of a foggy “thing” proves difficult. How does one avoid the pitfall of baggy abstractions? What’s the thing, finally, about the “thing”? However, Flaherty situates his general signifier in lush linguistic territory. “Essay on Not Knowing What I Mean by ‘Thing,’” for instance, starts with another interrogation of “thing” (“‘thing’ of my assembled evidence, ‘thing’ I measure against, ‘thing’ I am in possession of”). It continues, though, with exotic images like “scarves no longer attached to necks and snakes wind-whipped through no-man’s-land.” In other words, while the author’s “thing” darts and weaves to evade pinpointing, the careful construction of the surrounding language helps to render each mention of it strangely unique.

Flaherty’s book, though, is not all about the “thing,” which one might argue borders on a kind of pretentiousness or at least preciousness. In other poems, he exhibits a keen eye for the epigrammatic—that mainstay of the poetic idiom. In “Canticle Against the Canticle,” for example, the speaker explains that “[t]here is a certain shame necessary / to living well.” Later in the same poem, he desires “to be a prolonged / re-enactment of the Alamo,” while forgetting himself in “reshuffling the blocks // of dark.” These unexpectedly sharp and uncanny insights do all the work of the classic poetry of melancholia. Baudelaire would be proud. What’s more, one sheds the nagging vagueness of that “thing” and obliquely gains some understanding of it.

The speaker in What’s This, Bombardier? seems less concerned with the actual identity of the “thing” and more with the search surrounding it. For Flaherty, carrying that thing about means a “steady, livable, uranium life”—one of uncertainty and the inevitable vagaries of meaning. These poems gracefully accept that no answer exists to the constant questions of the analytical mind, that “the water is moving at least two ways at once” (“Notes on the Prefix ‘un’”). Flaherty’s unyoked, vaporous “thing” even seems acutely aware of its own instability and unnamable nature—if it could speak, that is. Better, the speaker appears self-conscious of his own inability to stop questioning. “In my defense,” he declares in “The Assembly, an Overview,” “I can’t put it down without turning to fragment.”

Finally, any haziness in What’s This, Bombardier? seems not so much imprecise poetics as a necessary component to the search for meaning at the heart of most any good poem.

C. J. Sage. The San Simeon Zebras. Knockeven, Ireland: Salmon Poetry, 2010. 72 pp. $21.95, paper.

I’m generally not a fan of tightly themed collections. I don’t want to read, say, fifty poems about pyramids. This is because, turned inward on subject, a poet can become a tiresome one- (or   two-) trick pony. Thankfully, this is not the case with C.J. Sage’s newest book, The San Simeon Zebras.

While most of the book’s poems can be said to be “about” animals, the animals are vehicles of their messages as much as any human persona might be. In an era marked by increasingly surreal violence, Sage clearly understands what Abraham Lincoln did—that our relationships with animals reveal our humanity.

There’s a fierce connectivity in these poems. Though I’ve never met Sage and don’t profess to know her religious views, I’ve gleaned from our editor/writer relationship (my manuscript won the 2010 book prize at Sage’s press) that she is an outspoken champion of animal rights. This voice parlays spiritually in her poems, as in “Memorandum on Human Being”:

I’ve heard
that fish hold a slippery secret: don’t think

there is a lasting flesh. The lines of lips
and their hooks will part—there is always
this promise of When.

Like Bishop before her, Sage marries image and theme to unanticipated end. As Bishop’s fish is long-suffering relic let go, Sage’s is sage messenger of a covenant that the speaker and the speech are united but for a finite time.

Similar issues of connection (and missed connection) abound in this collection. In “Ostriches” (lest we bury our heads in the sand) the speaker laments:

I wasn’t here yet, and so knew nothing of breaking.
How I’d have to bust out of my shell,
kick the egg walls in toward the dust nest,
go it alone, dig myself up out of that crater,
and live the dry life—

The opening poem, “Landscapes with Elephant Seals and Umbrellas,” explores the fragility of contact:

In the city I once saw a herd
of quick umbrellas open all at once—
all the owners purposely not touching—
[…]
Rarely, one of them brushes another.

as well as the hope that the innocent among us might reestablish that link:

To either side of the rows they make
lined up along each other there is a mile
of empty beach. Only a child makes use of it.

These poems cause us to feel things in new ways, and—warning—the emotions aren’t always comfortable. The poem “Field Notes,” for example, cinematically depicts a single buffalo’s demise by lions, and the players (“The hunters” and “one buffalo [who] strides into the water / to lick the victim’s wounds / [she kisses them] awhile”) could be a metaphor for any social scenario in which people compete for resources emotional and physical.

Sage’s poems use the imperative to bridge the strangeness and highlight the beauty in our interspecies interactions. In “How to Hold a Hummingbird,” directions such as “Understand why, for her, the mouth is most important” also call us to “Draw a warm bath—wrap her / like a canna leaf—she loves that.” “Sonnet for Carryhouse and Keeper” depicts man’s devotion to his pet, even as he figures God-like in her world: “his breath would set small clouds into her glass.”

In other poems, the language matches the motif, taking on a distinctly Biblical assignment:

“Donkey”

Giver of ears
to kings and fools,
long-faced, desert-drifted
carrier of saints and baggage,
[…]
o wooly, cross-backed wanderer
we keep corralled, o dove-
gray guide and deliverer
of goods, you take our hay and keep us.

The redemptive power of animals rests in the interplay between humans and beasts, and it’s never lost on the reader that humans are themselves not exempted animals, even as the speaker in “A Wilderness” acknowledges “There is a wilderness in me.”

While the occasional didactic statement creeps in, as in “Sea Canaries”: “Here is where they belong, / all right, / and here is where I leave them,” when it does it’s quickly redeemed by thoughtful lyricism: “To bate the brink / of bygone beauty, I bring no bait.” Such carefully packed sound catapults Sage to the head of the wordsmith line.  Here are linguistically rich and evenly crafted pieces that feel fully vested (only one poem, “Aubade,” doesn’t seem to fit thematically). The rhyme in “For Food,” for example, tethers us to its urgency and beauty:

on the drive home, orange and aglow,
see a thousand rows of spiny safflower heads!—
how they keep the local farm afire.

Who needs the opiate of poppies!
The rage of radish blossoms
fills a plate with flame.

The cumulative effect of long vowels in “home/aglow/rows/local/opiate” and “rage/plate/flame” becomes as meditative as the author’s vision. Sage’s finely tuned ear is stamped on powerful endings like the one in “Goat”:

We leave our gardens unattended, our backs
to both your province and your teeth,

our pant legs at your feet.
The bulk of you is not your horns;
your sum is in your hunger.

There is a hunger in these poems, a longing for salvation, compassion, and equality for the inhabitants of Earth. And though the final gesture is a despairing one (“I was born into captivity and I will leave a captive of this world”), the sum of Sage’s collection hinges on faith of “a living sign” that “men would find their way.” Indeed, these poems provide the guide.

Aaron Poochigian. The Cosmic Purr. San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2012. 59 pp. $16.95, paper.

Formal verse today often looks like the spoils of a hunt for the quirkiest subject matter. All the starchy rhyme and meter complement—it is supposed—the untamed subject like a tuxedo on a stand-up comic. And like the entertainment at an award ceremony, these poems mostly disappoint. By lending their zany tedium a finished sound, the form preserves them, sometimes long enough to get them lodged cozily in anthologies. And such tomes, one gathers, are mostly what they’re written for.

The poems in Aaron Poochigian’s The Cosmic Purr, though playful and formally skillful, are of another kind entirely. Poochigian takes little seriously, least of all himself, but his clowning has the dignity of bald despair. When his poems are silly, they’re silly in the way Kees’ were, or Auden’s. Here he is, shrugging consolation in “Reunion Show”:

The blasphemy we hurled
against the world
back then
was out of season.
Now we have damned good reason
To smash things up like ruined men.

And here he lends some sweetness to a one-night stand in “After Bar”:

If the pad was a horror of crumbling plaster
the dimmer respectfully whisked it from sight,
and the windows were pictures some pointillist master
had stippled with infinite twinges of light.

With fewer than sixty pages of poems, The Cosmic Purr makes one wish more poets would spare us their seam-bursting volumes of corpulent blather. All he has to say Poochigian says briefly and well. His topics are varied, but the book is far from a miscellany. The poems speak mostly of marriage and birth and death and thoughts of these. And these are plenty, spoken as they are in a voice like a drunk starlet’s designated driver.

In “The Stage Designer,” as in many poems, the speaker accepts his peripheral role with a good humor that can’t laugh off his loneliness: “And off they drove back to their own routines / and I to mine, and life may well be better / without the drama, the big ugly scenes.” Poochigian’s lyrics have little of the dizzy solipsism so common among those who sing of losing love. The pathos in these poems is no less full for being mingled with self-mockery.

Poochigian is a classicist who has previously published many translations of old Greek poets. A few sharp fragments of Sappho appear in The Cosmic Purr, and he gives us a handful of other shards from myth and antiquity. The expectation one has when meeting Greek myth in contemporary poetry is of brassy deconstruction. Not here. Poochigian’s ancients breathe real air but remain what they are: noble, terrible, and coarse in ways no longer available to us. The speakers’ weary restraint in “The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis” conceals a bleakness one encounters seldom now, even among the irreligious. As the goddesses bicker over their prize, the mortal women take some small comfort:

But we the drab mothers, the wedding-planners,
stood aloof and shrugged at their bad manners.
The world turned upside-down: though bound for Hades,
we snubbed Heaven’s Empress and the fancy ladies.
Gods were like mortals, mortals like the gods—
we paid them back in condescending nods.

No answers, no solutions, only passing consolations fill these poems. Poochigian is willing to play the fool for a laugh, as in “Places, Places”: “What lines, what cues, what songs? They have equipped me / only with rapier and mustachios.” But there’s no forgetting what his pratfalls are diversions from.

Toward the end of the book, a longish poem called “Antiphon” strikes the ear as a warning, however wryly uttered. In this account, Antiphon is a poet, and his new work is titled, “Horribler, Horribler.” The jeremiad concludes, tremulously, with advice to “Be wise, my comrades, gird / your loins, dig trenches and expect the worst. / It’s late now, and there’s nothing we can do.” Funny as this is, it ought to send a shudder of embarrassment through anyone who’s penned a rant on modern culture. Poochigian knows well what such poetry has to say, but he knows even better how little it’s heard. “Antiphon” ends with a startling picture of joy:

And as the crowd went on by fits and starts
catcalling and extolling Antiphon
a goatherd and a flute-girl (two sweethearts
who never would be rich or mean much harm)
yawned in the face of stylized despair
and, slipping off behind his master’s farm,
lay in a hayloft and were happy there.

By giving up his seriousness, the poet approaches grace.

The poems that dip from lightness into pain do so with clarity. The two quatrains of “The Parlor” make their insistent rhyme in plain speech—unpretentious, unforgiving. No resolution is possible for mass murder, and Poochigian provides none: “Our women—raped not just by anyone. / We never called the couch an ottoman.” Though the event to which the poem refers is unmistakable, the perpetrators are not honored with a name. And names are the only lasting solace in this collection. Immortality through words is an old hope (my wife claims it’s the oldest) and the book’s epigraph is Sappho’s vindication: “I declare / that later on / even in an age unlike our own, / someone will remember who we are.” So we do.

The best poems in The Cosmic Purr look after their subjects with an old friend’s gentle irony. In “Death and the Matron,” the book’s last poem, an actress prolongs her death scene with Zenoic stamina: “God bless the lady—she will go down talking / as if each passage were the last, / a swan singing a filibuster.” Poochigian performs his tricks not for the applause but to keep the  whole party going a little longer. To put off the night’s inevitable end. In this slim first collection, too many poems to name are enviably, sickeningly good, but among them is surely “The Vigil,” an elegy no sooner read than known by heart:

Because he was as hard to handle
as truth, which we equate to light,
go somewhere dark and light a candle
for Alan Sullivan tonight.