The Wise and Foolish Builders: Poems

The Winchester Mystery House, the Winchester rifle family, and the violent history of the American West provide the core that makes this second effort from Teague (Mortal Geography) a sporadic pleasure and a regular source of knowledge: Annie Oakley and other sharpshooters, Buffalo Bill, the laborers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, even the “command performances” of 1940s-era Armed Forces Radio (“the soldiers could ask for any sound”) give Teague occasions for her poems. The poet herself gives them forms: sonnets, couplets, hypermetrical villanelles, and a pattern in which all the end words repeat in reverse, so that the poem concludes as it began. Losses and near-losses from Teague’s life (“My mother dying, bitter, feverish,// drifting into the end before the end”) provide some counterpoint to what are mostly exercises in historical imagination. Teague has a commitment to research that rivals Robert Pinsky’s and Robyn Schiff’s (who also wrote on Winchester rifles), though she’s less confident in using her ear. These detail-rich poems (especially those about Sarah Winchester) possess both the attractions and the dangers of popular prose histories, even as they break out into lyricism that connects era to era, as when an early photographer’s “portable darknesses/ fill with faces we keep hoping to/ like.” [em](June) [/em]