The Grand Concourse: Poems

Kessler's ( A Road Came Once ) first book in 15 years is a journal of his experiments in form, a record of autobiographical impressions composing a careful identity of a poet returned from self-imposed exile. This volume shows the effects of a long privacy. The poet's eye, drawn to familiar places and longstanding relationships, gazing at passing memories, hesitates before moving on. His subjects are family and friends, the old neighborhood; these provide him with a secure point of reference for bold formal innovations: poems that range in structure from quatrain to concrete this is the name of a form of poetry . Overall, the poems are objective, and many of them, such as ``Six Flags of Summer,'' reach a meditative synthesis of observation and emotion: ``The flying duck sounds like a shadow laughing in a cabin / far back in the trees. / I am inclined to tell it / how sorry I am for what I've done.'' Grand Concourse is a metaphor for the mind and its faculties, touched by the past that holds both future and present within, restless and resolved. Theg collection should establish Kessler as one of our foremost contemporary poets. (Sept.)