Totem & Shadow: New & Selected Poems

Well-known for editing the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry as well as the literary journal New American Writing, Hoover is also the author of five books of poems from which he here makes a cohesive selection, and adds new work. His aesthetic fuses the chatty observational wisdom of the New York School with a postmodern skepticism of linguistic transcendence (""intense bits/ of emotional/ baggage constant/ as genres""), which most often leads to a kind of familiar po-mo lament: ""There's/ no `new meaning.'/ Old words circle/ beyond our contriving."" Unlike anything envisioned by the Romantics, this is a world ""designed by Michael Jackson,"" where Madonna and the Serbs lure our attentions away from modernist texts like Finnegans Wake--which is to say, the poems are deeply informed by the culture wars inaugurated in the '80s. One Hoover response is to playfully rebel against the literature, whether recommending Conrad's Heart of Darkness after one's finished watching I Love Lucy or claiming to have ""sat on the face of T.S. Eliot / and squirmed my butt around."" In the new poems, Hoover seems to be looking for a way to articulate a more positivist poetic, whether it be through affirmative eros (""love's/ singular language/ has ten/ tongues"") or beauty: ""I listen all day/ to Miles Davis play,/ beautifully and/ clearly, `So Near,/ So Far'."" Whether or not Hoover finds a way out of the questions the poems ask, the questioning itself remains genuine and open-ended. (June)