Straits: Poems

After 15 collections of poetry, as well as various and sundry collections of plays, essays and fiction, Koch continues to delight in the audacious nonsense and language games that earned him the nickname ""Dr. Fun."" Many of the poems here--especially the section of songs culled from the plays--are squibs, little bursts of verbal ingenuity: ""No more sandals made from fibrous particles of lunch/ Dropped on the equally fibrous cheerleader. Uhuh, Henry Hudson!"" Just when this joy in free association becomes too juvenile for comfort, Koch switches gears: ""The Seasons,"" a recasting of James Thomson's 18th-century classic, is expert pastiche, demonstrating a love of the very blank-verse sonorities that it sets out to parody: ""...we find/ Truth more gigantic in the sexual mind/ That steers us through the corridors with bump/ Occasional...."" Despite his tributes to Mayakovsky (a favorite of fellow New York Schooler Frank O'Hara) in the prosy title poem and elsewhere here, Koch does not come off as a full-blown revolutionary, attacking tradition or meaning. His playful formalism and illogic, well represented in the selected volume, The Great Atlantic Rainway, and in the Bollingen Award-winning One Train (both 1994), seem rather to question the very possibility of seriousness with stealthy sincerity. Whether writing about other poets and artists, illness and aging, or family and intimacy, Koch gives us glimpses of the man behind the curtain: ""Is nothing new sacred? The screen is standing up./ My daughter and her baby come for tea. The baby comes for milk./ They're here in time."" (May)