The Interlude

Readers who enjoy traditional verse will delight in this book-length poem, a highly concentrated farce. A modern lawyer, ``whom we shall leave / unnamed,'' stumbles through the ruins of his marriage, failed affairs, unemployment and atheism; attempts to cheat the system backfire. This anti-hero is as utterly bemused by contemporary America as if he had somehow been transplanted from another age. His ``twice-fallen patron saint'' is Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and inventor who, when the Romans invaded, ``went home / to take a bath and sulk, to formulate, / in simple algebra, how a heavy crown / displaces the self.'' Fenza roots the philosophical meditations of his first book in picturesque imagery: ``It's good to be the king--when the world, if she desires your attention, must come / to you. One king was so impressed with his / hefty serving of beef that he knighted it; / but as rush hour began, our leading man / drank cheap gin for dinner, blinking / and blanking out on a wobbly kitchen chair.'' Recurrent topics, such as suicide, various angels with their fallible attributes and Archimedes, and intimate letters to ``X'' unite the numbered sections here, but most images are topical and fleeting, enhancing the comic voice. (Sept.)