After the Fall: Poems Old and New

Field is among the first American poets to write proudly and clearly about urban gay life.This new-and-selected (Field’s 16th book of verse overall) shows that his virtues—and limits—have remained consistent throughout. At his best Field is direct, likable, modest, charming, a storyteller : he writes purposefully and directly of bathhouse life in the 1970s, Jewish-American heritage, Middle Eastern travels in “a world where, unlike ours, men like each other”; and allegorically of the Pacific octopus, “who needs love,/ who is a mess when you meet,/ but who can open up like a flower with petal arms.” At less than his best, Field’s unadorned style can make him sound predictable: his poems are only as interesting as their stories and ideas. “Nowadays there’s nothing radical left, certainly not/ in the Village,” he complains in a poem from the 1990s. A recent 9/11 poem objects to “a gang of psychopaths taking over the government.” Irreplaceable in the history of gay American writing, Field helped invent some of the attitudes and the subgenres that are now in common use. If many of Field’s own poems now seem flat and dated, enough still seem fresh to give serious strength to this book. (Oct.)