cover image You've Just Been Told

You've Just Been Told

Elizabeth Macklin. W. W. Norton & Company, $22 (95pp) ISBN 978-0-393-04867-4

Macklin's poems, encountered frequently in the New Yorker, can often barely contain their delicious surface detail. ""See. See?,"" ""The Homeland"" (""Flowering/ home-carved cherry heartwood"") and ""A Chance Small Fruit,"" lead us (as in the last) in wonderfully faux-na ve adventures in synesthetic metaphor: ""In the taste/ of this sour apple/ is the bee/ making pictures/ of honey."" But what motivates Macklin's (A Woman Kneeling in the Big City) speaker to share these sensations is a kind of pathos to which many New Yorker readers obviously relate--the fear of the loss of agency, and of direct experience of the world, that can come with economic privilege. Thus, the book's title phrase turns out to be completed by ""to move to/ Wolfe Island,"" a shabby-chic enclave with ""a road with a name like/ Button Edge Road,"" yet a place that smacks of death, of ""Whatever your choice was."" ""It is"" firmly declares that ""The sun should go down beyond/ a river.// That's what it does when I am home."" Whatever their creator's origins, the leisured langour and worried precision of this book's speaker make her domestic vignettes read like eminently consumable lifestyle accessories. Quality and quantity-evaluations (""bright little words,"" ""A hundred apologies""), fidgety suffixation (""granitic,"" ""fixitic"") and falsely epigrammatic endings (""I couldn't hold off--wait--wait/ to tell the truth. Now there isn't any."") can't draw attention away from the lack of correspondingly edgy insights. Such problems do not keep verse like ""Students of Grammar"" (recalling familial parsings), ""The Lazy Girl Was Never Scolded"" and others from being entertaining, but they reveal the work's limits, of which the poet seems aware. In ""Detail from the Large Work,"" the search for a way out of the poetry of connoisseurship turns up as a theme, whereby thick description of a cropped artwork yields an elided main subject: ""That's how we missed whole houses burning."" One hopes she won't miss them the next time. (Apr.)