How can a poet's style reflect the dislocations of New York after 9/11, the insensate wreck he sees in American politics and the particular gifts and difficulties of Arab-American heritage? Joseph (Before Our Eyes
) answers those questions in this, his fourth and strongest book of verse, with a dizzying mix of abstractions, urban details and nuggets of historical fact. (FSG will republish Joseph's first three books in September as Codes, Precepts and Taboos
.) "The two things that are interesting," Lawrence muses, "are history and grammar," envisioning both as "wild and fragile." At times his verse focuses squarely on politics: "What—let's say— twelve years from now," he asks, "will the zone of suffering that exists/ outside the established orders look like?" In another poem, "The state of the physical world," finally, "depends on shifts in the delusional thinking/ of very small groups." The same poem brings in images from Revelations ("the seven-headed beast from the sea"), from Ground Zero, from factory life, from a photographic still life and from the hard life of the poet's immigrant father. Joseph's "dream technique" of juxtapositions and exclamations derives from the late style of Robert Lowell, from whom he also takes one of his titles, updating Lowell's Vietnam-era frustrations for the era of smart bombs and globalization. (Sept.)
