Time Is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt

Lauded in the 1970s as a master of the prose poem, Benedikt (1935-2007) now seems inseparable from that decade: the whimsical, yet deeply pessimistic writer rose to prominence with the bizarre long lines of Sky (1970) and the fathomlessly sad prose blocks of Mole Notes (1971). In the former, "the sky goes around dropping airliners all the time," while the Kafkaesque latter contains "a poetry almost empty of encouraging imagery." What Benedikt's sentences lack in verbal sparkle they make up for in gallows humor, in their truth to a frustration that others may share. An influential editor (The Prose Poem: An International Anthology), Benedikt fell into debilitating agoraphobia during the 1980s. Gallaher (Map of the Folded World) and Boss (Stripping) make a thorough case for the many pages of late poems this edition rescues, poems almost ended up in the trash: salvaged work from the 1970s contains many scary, on-target prose blocks, but his later or lineated works include diffuse memoirs, near-memos to better-known friends (Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, James Tate), where "some of the things which can happen to talented people in this world// Are unfair & sometimes seem intolerable." (Apr.)