cover image Lights & Mysteries

Lights & Mysteries

Thomas Centolella. Copper Canyon Press, $12 (114pp) ISBN 978-1-55659-106-8

Centolella establishes himself as major poetic voice in this, his second collection, taking on big questions of love, life, death and mystery with authoritative clarity of language and intensity of purpose. His first, Terra Firma, offered a cleverly mixed San Francisco post-Beat, neo-Zen hip view of the dark side of human nature from a kind of lapsed Catholic perspective of frailty and sin. The 43 poems in this volume continue the stylistic mixed bag, yet constitute a more coherent collection as they trace a three-part journey from new love to lost love and bitter self-examination to renewed compassion. Section I, pursuing the elusive glow of romance, contains some excessive writing: on a houseboat, ``We were any two creatures floating./ Wetness everywhere, the whole world liquescent, delicious.'' Poems of the next section, in which the poet wanders the city streets, are tough-minded and tightly wound: ``Pennants strung like motley teeth/ along the mission's little white stucco wall.'' The third section sounds basic Centolella themes: ``Love more, require less, love without regard/ for form. You have to live further in.'' (Nov.)