cover image The Ledge

The Ledge

Michael Collier. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $22 (80pp) ISBN 978-0-618-05014-7

Collier builds many of his poems around a single incident, whether his speaker is caught lying, in naked boyhood, on a bathroom floor while his sisters conduct a mock-crucifixion, or is simply being captivated by a man who crashes through a country club's plate-glass door. In this, Collier's fourth book, such ruminations still have their descriptive charms, but generally lack the dramatic urgency necessary to sustain the book as a whole. At times, Collier attempts to up the ante by invoking the mythical likes of an Odysseus or Sisyphus, but such figures often end up being trivialized. In ""Pay-Per-View,"" for example, Collier compares the distorted images of a scrambled hotel porno flick to Pandora's ""winged souls that once escaped/ from her exquisite jar--the shadows of our pains, the venom/ carriers of our desires."" A plethora of animal poems prove capable vehicles for some nice phrasal and observational turns: a snake's skin is ""a loose diamond basket weave""; ""The New Opossum"" is an ""upholder of middle-class values,/ and link to a romantic past""; while the ""Brave Sparrow"" is playfully exhorted to ""Stay where you are, you lit fuse, you dull spark of saltpeter and sulfur."" Still, domestic scenes that confront a young son with ""the puddle of urine/ beneath the toilet"" or the rabbit-killing dog of ""A Real-Life Drama"" don't reverberate in the manner Collier seems to be aiming for, making images like ""[h]is cock,/ a huge suppurating rudder, stirred the sulfuric/ ocean of his realm"" (describing Cerberus) seem desperate stays against bourgeois ennui. (Apr.)