The first of two long poems that make up this volume from the prolific co-editor of Verse
charts a troubled relationship among the cubicles at a declining paper mill. "Farewell faithful smokestack!" Henry writes, his lines by turns ironic and deadly serious, toxic and mysterious. Using quotes from such poets as James Schuyler, James Merrill and Henri Cole to propel each of the 31 parts, the poem "More Dangerous Than Dying" sneaks up on a narrative and backs away from it: "How late we came into the story/ not as protagonists but as props." In the title poem, Henry pushes language further, cycling through lines that circle desire until the poem itself is "stripped," literally and figuratively–from six-line sections to two lines—fading into "surrender" and ending with "darkness." By continually matching different lines together, Henry surprises ("Some days the tongue needs a prophylactic/ Medusa could use a snaky excuse") and puzzles ("This matter of suffixes suffices/ No wonder the pages allow it to travesty") and challenges readers to drift in a fragmentary, linguistic sea. At times, it feels like a complex pattern of interesting lines without much at the center. Nonetheless, Henry (Quarantine
) remains a poet to watch. (Feb.)
