Often breathtaking, at times impenetrable, this latest collection from Kocot (Poem for the End of Time
) intersperses frantic images with hauntingly simple and loss-laden outcries. Throughout, there is the poet’s thwarted longing for an understanding that cannot come: “all poets and poetry elude me,/ especially myself and my own”; Kocot’s speaker—a voice simultaneously adorable, helpless and deeply brave—is both obsessed with and frustrated by process: “See, in a poem, things actually/ have to be doing things,/ not just floating around.” While poems go by without offering a foothold (“Trapezoidal sleep, spell-check aflame with saints,/ roseate silo, the arrows are dark”), Kocot’s most lucid moments achieve a kind of visionary clarity (“The waters are very simple today./ Hospital blue, in error of twilight”), a beautiful refusal to accept the inevitable (“Listen, I said it before, die/ and come back as fire”) and inklings of the kind of loss that could yield such a powerful, almost overflowing book: “I wait to go to you,/ smoking and breaking curses under/ the Jackson Pollock fuck you moon.” (Apr.)
