This fifth collection's title mostly refers to the body itself as hazardous material; the book includes poems about tattoos, the ever-hazardous penis ("Men are known to appreciate/ What it stands for"), and death by cancer and AIDS-related illnesses. For New Yorkers like McClatchy (Ten Commandments; Twenty Questions), "hazmat" will immediately recall September 11; a three-sonnet set called "Jihad" reacts not so much to one terrorist incident but to the Middle East troubles generally, and to the word "jihad," thereby adding language to the list of what may be toxic: "The holy war/Is waged against the self at first, to raze/The ziggurat of sin we climb upon/To view ourselves, and next against that glaze/The enemies of faith will use to disguise/Their words. Only then, and at the caliph's nod,/Are believers called to drown in blood the people/Of an earlier book. There is no god but God." A series of 20 short poems ("Motets") brings McClatchy's classicism into a more compressed, more narrative mode, taking up bodies, illness or sex: "shapes on the sheet,/yours doubled over, mine clenched and released." The longest and last poem, "Ouija," is McClatchy's elegy for James Merrill, using the séance form central to Merrill's own epic to memorialize Merrill's project, to consider the mystery of his oeuvre and to "imagine a wave goodbye." If the book's varying materials aren't quite volatile enough to merit the title, they are still very affecting. (Oct.)
Forecast: McClatchy, who is Merrill's literary executor, is the longtime editor of the
Yale Review, and a prolific anthologist (a book of translations of Horace's Odes by 35 contemporary poets is due from Princeton in October), but he has not overpublished his verse. Fans will buy the book sight unseen, others will hear about it via reviews taking theMerrill angle.
