Flowers

Killebrew strikes many different notes in his long-awaited debut. Amid poems cluttered with offices, “confederated ideas,” ambition, and calls from the mayor, he is sometimes cheeky, resigned to “the tremendous gap between the refrigerator/ and the conscientious voter.” Love poems like “I Will Learn to Make You Happy” and “I Love Country Music” are intimate and graceful, displaying startling and simple truths, noticed precisely. Killebrew channels Frank O'Hara, and it's tempting to get lost in these moments of ebullience. Elsewhere, John Ashbery is the New York School spirit most palpably felt, not just in the poem titled for him, but also in the long central poem “In Eight Parts,” which begins, “I grew up an anxious painting by my dad's shaking hand,” and can be read as Killebrew's “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” There are also more abstract moments: “birdbath interstate flowerbed shoulder restitution fencing.” Throughout, Killebrew intelligently and compellingly explores the possibilities and uses of poetry and the experience of living in language—how its abstractions seduce, and how concrete moments like thunderstorms “make the whole thing feel justified,/ or at least without unbearable luxury.” Though his work worries the “negotiation between expectation/ and an ever-tapering capacity for surprise,” Killebrew's collection leaves us plenty of reason to be optimistic. (Apr.)