The Potato Eaters

After co-translating Cees Nooteboom's The Captain of the Butterflies and co-writing a monograph on Czeslaw Milosz, Nathan returns to poetry with this collection of self-revealing, hermetic little lyrics, which have been appearing regularly in the New Yorker and elsewhere. They offer the sort of wry vignettes and homilies that only a distinguished, late-career poet can pull off, such as ""Minna,"" who ""Hired herself out to a man/ who needed a shave and took, it seems,/ certain kinds of photographs."" Three stanzas later, ""When things improved, Minna became a good,/ if ironic wife."" One must check a certain feminist consciousness at the door of this and other poems (""Sweet is pure disinterest, sweeter/ even than the sweetness of syrup/ spun in cream, almost as sweet/ as love spun in young bodies""), but for the most part, Nathan's twinkle will be encouragement enough. Some poems, such as ""In the Woods""--a 12-line account of the Goldilocks story from the perspective of the little bear--are a little too transparent. In other cases, however, Nathan's directness pays dividends, as in the collection's opening lines, ""Sometimes, the naked taste of potato/ Reminds me of being poor.// The first bites are gratitude,/ the rest, contented boredom."" While not additive enough to read cover-to-cover, Nathan's knowing courtings of cliche yield lovely chance enounters: ""Is that you? It can't be you. It's a ghost./ And are those roses real? Real yes and red."" (Jan.)