cover image Incomplete Knowledge

Incomplete Knowledge

Kathryn Maris, . . Four Way, $14.95 (49pp) ISBN 978-1-884800-71-9

Determinedly affable, chatty and low-key even when his subjects are bleak, Harrison's fourth volume stakes almost everything on the winning tone that pushes his almost prose-like, free verse poems. Often that gamble succeeds: viewing Manhattan on New Year's Eve, 2000, Harrison (Feeding the Fire , 2001) muses, "I wish I could give you/ this pale blue city under the glass/ of a plane window like a snowglobe," the sweet wish barely ruffled by the specter of 9/11. "Fork" recalls a decadeslong revenge against a malevolent writing teacher; "To Kenneth Koch" elegizes a great one, while seasonal verse discusses baseball ("Sometimes this is all it takes, moving a pile/ of screened loam"). These lighter subjects lead up to weighty poems about the poet's brother's suicide and his grandmother's dementia, topics which together occupy perhaps a third of the volume, including the moving sequence "An Undertaking," which narrates the day-to-day aftermath of the brother's death. These memoirlike poems have the bizarre details real grief always includes (the brother had "Enough socks/ for several lifetimes"), along with the sadness no verbal talent can assuage. (Oct.)