Celebrated since the 1980s for his urbane command of traditional forms, McClatchy (Ten Commandments
) has steadily expanded his tonal and topical range: this sixth collection is his most various, its many modes held together by worldly apprehension at his own middle age, and at the unsatisfactory lives of lovers and friends. The ambitious sequence “The Young Fate” strings together allegorical vignettes, each having to do with resignation and loss: “What envy does the sun have? What choice the moon?” An even more ambitious sequence, “Trees Walking,” takes its unrhymed meter from the Latin, its array of stories from the Gospel of Mark and the gossip of gay men at the opera, and its sensibility from the poet's awareness that his body will eventually fail. A sequence of narrative sonnets tells a fanciful story spun off from Madame Butterfly
, set during the Japanese internment. Other sonnets speak for all of the “Seven Deadly Sins”; “Envy” gets a simple song with the chorus “Why him and not me?” McClatchy sounds more than ever like himself. The plainly styled “Er” (perhaps McClatchy's best poem) glides masterfully from the poet's love life to the Epic of Gilgamesh
, and thence to celestial symbols of fate, “spangled ranks/ Of wheeling planetary orbits moving as they must,/ Each sounding a note in harmony with the rest.” (Feb.)
