When I Was a Poet

Linked to the beats and to the 1950s-vintage confluence of poetry and jazz, Meltzer, in his first collection since the retrospective selection David's Copy (2005) and the long poem Beat Life (2005), keeps on looking back, understandably sad "To see us then/ resistant &/ glamorously young/ now dead or dying." Meltzer remembers "California dreamin" decades ago, when it seemed to him and his friends that "Utopia's just around the corner/ lodged beneath overpass freeway." Recollections of American artistic and musical history sit comfortably beside recollections of a rich inner life, in phrases that sound almost ritualized ("When I was a Poet/ Passion was a Wire/ plugged into Nerve Ends") and in the concluding, comic self-portrait. The deliberately nostalgic book design (a Pocket Poets series cover) perhaps emphasizes Meltzer's place in history to the detriment of his strongest new work, which is less interested in pathos than in a mysterious strength, convinced that "words work best when/ they know they can't." The short poems called "Amulets," in particular, rise above countercultural scene setting toward the empyrean of the early Ginsberg: "Sucking death from our mouths before we can sing/ This amulet wants wings to work against the King of nightfalling." (June)