Poetry State Forest

In Mayer’s 21st collection, the prolific New York School veteran mixes prose poems, pastorals, sonnets, epigrams and dream catalogues to create an unruly but characteristically joyous book of everyday transcendence. As always, the pleasures of Mayer’s poetry come not only from her calculatedly casual voice and her artful restraint but especially her messy insistence on play and her explorations of what is and is not literature. “[I] write unbalanced poetry,” she says. “As a 61-year old poet,” she writes in “Summer Solstice 2006,” “my aims haven’t much changed.” Yet this late work is elegiac and defiant while still quotidian, colloquial and self-reflective, as poems with titles like “Winner of the Bad Poem Contest” and “Inky Dinky Parlez-Vous: Variations on Sponge Bob Square Pants” attest. After her many incarnations as ingenue, performance artist, teacher, mother, shaman and poetry rabble-rouser, Mayer’s become something of a wise woman of letters. “Sometimes,” she writes, “it seems like every-/thing’s a mistake.” Readers will wish more people could make mistakes like these. (Nov.)