cover image Doubles

Doubles

Robert Polito. University of Chicago Press, $25 (64pp) ISBN 978-0-226-67337-0

As the title suggests, the poems in this collection from the director of the Writing Program at the New School for Social Research are something other than integral views of single subjects. Also uneven, these gritty, urban poems are by turn brilliant and under-realized, scattered through with moments that, like bits of mica in a city sidewalk, draw readers along. ``Doubles'' and ``First Love'' mark two Polito ``poles''-caustic irony in the first poem in which the speaker discusses the imagined lives of cloned twin sons, and, in the second, lyrical tension as a little boy enrages and amazes his father, ``His awe equal to his anger-/ So that, in the end, he's unable to strike.'' The 12-part ``Evidence'' tells an anguished first-person story of an illicit affair, but the overlong work begins to drift, leaving the reader to wonder what, finally, is ``the story behind the story.'' Still, there are indelible images: a vision of a sexual hell where ``Bare bulbs in the airshaft glow/ Like a plug-in, portable fire from Sears...'' (Oct.)