Terrain Vague

Basking in the twilight of Late Romanticism, Meier (no relation to the architect), in his debut, finds the rays seductive but damaging. Frequent nods to predecessors abound; whether revising Stevens's ""Ideas of Order"" or growing impatient with his ""Disillusionment of Ten O'clock,"" Meier rejects the redemptive power of a supreme fiction, casting his lot with the postmodern lyricism of Michael Palmer and linguistic slippage of the quickly lyric Ashbery. Meier is at his best when engaged in rapid-fire verbal play: ""So yield my ghost/ control, unman that manikin, and you will awaken/ into union, my imagined monumental monument."" Such Shakespearean pyrotechnics, however, once expected, can fall predictably short of their Will-ful progenitor and lack the torque of mod bard Chris Stroffolino: ""Unfaithful meaning/ had not faith in faith in me, or in you had, or in you you/ found another faithful."" Having dismissed the possibilities of narrative and, relatedly, mythical depth (though Dido, Aeneas and Orpheus are variously summoned), Meier resorts to the sensational (""Her cunt melted a blizzard in the Chinese poem, that old woman, saving a village"") and to self-inoculated sentiment, the speaker ""caught gawking/ At the world whose trees weep/ In wind, laughter, intolerable sadness."" Such moments seem like a calculated gamble that the very real, felt world will paradoxically come into focus from the well-wrought nouvelle vague he presents. While that doesn't quite happen in this book, Meier's sophisticated debut promises further developments. (Dec.) Forecast: Verse Press is the nonprofit project of Verse magazine founder and Univ. of Georgia assistant professor Brian Henry, whose debut book of poems is due next year from Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press. Verse Press has already generated some po-biz buzz as an outpost for younger ellipticists, from which Meier's book should benefit.