GULF MUSIC: POEMS -- By Robert Pinsky Farrar, Straus and Giroux / 96 pages / $22
The gulf in the title of Pinsky's seventh collection is both the large southern body of water that has been the site of so much weather-related misery, and the unavoidable distances between an author's thoughts and feelings and his expression. Poems from the first section frequently butt up against subjects too large for speech, and break down into music and mystery. The title poem begins with a devastating hurricane in Galveston, Texas, in 1900 and reaches after fragments and song to recall what was lost: "O try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah wallah-woe."Another poem describes the ecstasy of forgetting, in which an enraptured audience at once hears and doesn't hear what it's being told.
TIME AND MATERIALS: POEMS 1997-2005
By Robert Hass Ecco / 96 pages / $22.95
The first book in 10 years from Hass, a former U.S. poet laureate, may be his best in 30. These new poems show a rare internal variety, even as they reflect his constant concerns. One is human impact on the planet at the century's end: a nine-part verse-essay addressed to the ancient Roman poet Lucretius sums up evolution, deplores global warming and says that the earth needs a dream of restoration in which "She dances and the birds just keep arriving." Another concern is biography and memory, not so much Hass' own life as the lives of family and friends. A poem about his sad father and alcoholic mother avoids self-pity by telling a finely paced story.
ELEGY: POEMS
By Mary Jo Bang Graywolf Press / 80 pages / $20
Aware that there is no vocabulary equal to conveying the pain of losing a loved one or the struggle to be faithful to the loss, the poet ruefully admits, "That's where things went wrong." Ostensibly a linear account of a year of sorrow, the structure of the collection suggests rather that grief might be crystalline, the poems accruing around a memory that won't move on: "I say Come Back and you do/ Not do what I want." While the poet must write and rewrite in order to get her subject right, the mother of a dead child writes to fill a bottomless chasm. Like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, Bang finds no easy consolation, and there is pain for the reader here, too, as when, toward the end of the collection, Bang writes, "Everything Was My Fault / Has been the theme of the song." Calling to mind Sharon Olds' The Father and Donald Hall's Without, two other harrowing contemporary book-length poetic studies of loss, Bang offers, if not hope, a kind of keeping company, a way, however painful, to go on: "Otherwise no longer exists./ There is only stasis, continually/ Granting ceremony to the moment." SELECTED POEMS
