The Thread: New and Selected Poems

With an admirable reverence for the formal narratives of Robert Frost, Sandy (Thanksgiving over the Water) writes sometimes dense, sometimes simple narrative poems that are colloquial yet steeped in a love of attaining the grander sweep of poetic utterance. This survey of Sandy's six books over more than 30 years of work reflects a career's worth of formally eclectic dialogues with Frost and other masters of the tradition at large. There are fine poems written in carefully metered stanzas, for example, such as ""Words for Dr. [I.A.] Richards"" (""Say he's not hard on her,/ Just hard. Make no mistake./ His tiffs, his lusts were pure;/ No violence is fake""), baroque in their play of sounds and syntax. Other poems suggest the epic tradition as taken up by Pound, or the abstract despair of Eliot, as in ""Ed Quid Amabo Nisi Quod Aenigma Est"": ""Madness may well/ be a crowded mind. But fury comes to the/ stripped life. The soul that would survive its strife/ grows/ accident-prone, carefully careless/ with its flesh."" There are also a number of experiments with the lines of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson, which mingle freely with the formal verse and are written from a similar excitement about America and things American. If lacking the kind of major, oeuvre-centering pieces to which Sandy often seems to be aspiring, the volume is filled with affecting and enjoyable performances, impressive in execution and in perceptive detail. (May)