Founder of BOA editions, editor of college poetry course favorite Contemporary American Poetry
and respected translator, Poulin was also a poet in his own right. Released five years after his death, at a few years short of 60, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of BOA, this collection culls from In Advent
(1972), A Momentary Order
(1987) and Cave Dwellers
(1991), three of Poulin's six books. Poulin's ambitions are consistently high: his lyrics are at once profoundly religious and radically secular, poignantly private and pointedly political. Where Poulin is strong and clear, the complexity of these aims is achieved with seeming effortlessness. A father speaking to his daughter ("But I can't purify/ this air you'll breathe"), speaks for all caretakers of the earth and its inhabitants. Too often however, Poulin descends into fuzzy sentimentality on the one hand ("the lilies of the valley that I picked/ for you faded") or overstated weightiness on the other ("every// simple human thing we did became/ a total act of war and/ this world a planetary charnel house"). The highlight is "Angelic Orders: A Bestiary of Angels," an alphabetical sequence that reads the angelic into various mundanities ("The Angel of the American Dream," "The Angels of Birth," etc.); it is playful and funny, imaginative and formally thoughtful. Translations of Rilke (for which Poulin is arguably best known) and of the Quebecois poet Anne Hebert, which he himself considered as important as his original work, are absent here in favor of weaker material. Still, when he is on, Poulin casts a clear but passionate eye on histories familial and national, and talks his way through an array of guilts and disappointments. (July)
