In a wry, arch, self-consciously Eliotic voice, Gewanter attempts in this second collection to chart a vexed moral universe: "Daily I am told/ to love my neighbor—but huddled/ inside my love is a loathing for his filthy life." Socially conscious lyrics that pick up from Robert Lowell (Gewanter was the co-editor of the recently released Lowell Collected
) juxtapose the classical with the contemporary: Bill Clinton comes on as Catullus; a Parkinson's patient is called "Mr. Circe." General Motors, Hitler, Charles Atlas and John F. Kennedy Jr. appear in the book's second half. The harm/help binarism is mined relentlessly: animal rights activists free diseased rabbits; Quakers hunt whales for God. Throughout, a Lowell-like visceral force contends with a tendency toward cleverness ("Is Cassius Clay?"). "Chai 1924–2000,"an elegy for the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, can't quite forgo that archness, ruminating on "Your name, in the macaroni/ of tongues, Ah-me-hide,/
foreign and sentimental// as the pendant Chai—life—/ noosing the ancients of St. Pete/ waiting for the Early Bird Special/ ...Drop the page,/ come out. Come out
." Yet the overall impression that the book leaves is of a seriousness and rigor in trying to find a means to moral clarity; even if it sometimes seems "scrawled/ onto Vanna's body," it is, finally, "a love letter/ charge/ of piety." (Nov.)
