Levine's pessimistic, even apocalyptic third volume picks up where Enola Gay
(2000) and his influential debut, Debt
(1992) left off: startling and slippery images, and fast-moving, even disorienting poems depict postmodern scenes so fragmentary, noisy and degraded that the would-be poet, prophet or rebel can barely see or say what's going on. And yet, as he has before, Levine finds in this grim confusion not just style but panache: "The patient climbs down his sinkhole/ hand over hand, impatient. Look. No hands." Where his previous jeremiads focused on money and war, Levine's new book concentrates on the environment, on woods, ponds, fields and the devastation human settlement can bring; a persistent subplot concerns children, schooling and schools, as if to ask whether poetry could teach us anything worth knowing. The result is a significant ecological poetics. One sparkling poem depicts a "sunlit trench// in which a root was/ notched by the tool's/ dull edge"; another warns an ill-fated willow tree that "human traffic with its rinse/ of promises and pauses is coming/ for keeps." (Apr.)
