Reluctant Gravities

A wonderful mix of philosophical conversation, erotic questions and astrophysical speculation, the latest volume of genre-blurring prose poetry from Waldrop (Lawn of Excluded Middle) continues the intellective experiment that now spans her 40-odd years and 15 books. ""Born as an afterthought,"" Waldrop states, ""I doubt propositions without body heat or shadow."" As in Lawn, her jumpy, startling, abstract sentences seek to interrogate ordinary notions of logic, reference, grammar and truth. Where many American poets flee scientific realism for bodily or religious transcendence, Waldrop's work plays intellect off against itself, appealing to chaos theory, non-Euclidian geometry and contemporary cosmology in order to undermine ordinary ideas about language, truth and logic: ""the crow does not fly as the crow flies."" The book's unusual structure continues the explorations its lines and sentences embody. Each of six sections includes four prose ""conversations""; between each section and the next comes an ""interlude,"" consisting of a ""song"" in short-lined verse, a ""meditation"" and another song. Waldrop depicts swerving and desire, particle anihilation and creation, braiding phenomenology with physics: ""the hawk's plummet smears the gap visible, a scar to be deciphered as force of attraction. Or gravity."" Waldrop's difficult quidditities gesture toward the European experimenters she has translated, notably Edmond Jab s. Her new work's mixed genres also recall the William Carlos Williams of Spring and All, as do her remarkable insistences on the physical, material force of words. Her defiantly brilliant speculations, ready for vigorous readers to decipher, retain an attraction all their own.(Oct.)