Arbutus Reviews

In a dozen long lined and fragmented poems Maxwell has created a book that enacts its title. The longer lines make these poems feel whispered, in tones excited, hurried, and meditative. The fragmented structure of the poems, as they spread through the book, give the sense of time passing in a sustained session between poet and reader. The poems on the whole are strong, though they can rely on zest to sustain them, there are specific moments where the wit and pathos come together to make something lovely.
The poems can be very funny. For example in “Log of Dead Birds” the line appears, “I intended to make a table so you would trust me—“ before an example table shows up a few lines later. Seeing the table made me laugh, but also to ask, is it necessary? The above line is so good that I am not sure I need the visual of the actual table. But because my eyes can gloss over the visual it does not take too much away from the poem.
I admire this same playfulness when it is merged more deeply with metaphor and the natural world. As in the poem “Sarcophagus” in the second section titled, “: Night hawks” the protagonist is meditating on a relationship that, as I read it, is just beginning:

its eye-time. What he looks like
because his computer commutes
my seeing. This is a fun time! I tell him
when the wind makeshifts a skirt around me
while a hawk adorns its talons
with mouse and crushes our simple idea of bulbs
devious with their dangling light.

Perhaps a relationship is instantly doomed when one must declare it is a “fun time.” But the humor of one voice leading the other through the potential violence of two things in this world coming together, the crushing nature of relationships merged with that of predator and prey make these lines engaging.
The books linguistic wit along with the narrative and philosophical playfulness bring Stephen Burt’s newest book of criticism’s title to mind (Close Calls With Nonsense) but as he often argues in that book such close calls can bring us, as readers, closer to the chaotic world we live in and provide pleasure along the way.