The Violence

With its mystical fragments, bluntly sexual invocations, and cryptic stanzas halfway between memories and magic spells, Paquin searches in this third collection for "someone please to tell time for the beneath"; he goes on to imagine the hidden forces "beneath" ordinary lives, among them death, lust and visions of eternity. Some pages are agrammatical, collage-like imprecations; others resemble prayers. Much of the work includes exclamations, some of them passionate, others comically random: "Come on in, cathedral!/ I won't harm you!" "I like being palatalized by rain!" Such visceral emphases sometimes bring to mind the spell-casting poetry of Robert Duncan, at other times a scrambled postmodern Dylan Thomas. Paquin (Accumulus ) also uses the page as a canvas, turning the book sideways, leaving blank lines in place of key nouns, or otherwise making layout do expressive work: these interests recall Paquin's interest in design and form as editor of the on-line journal Slope . But he attends productively to far-flung natural landscapes, among them a Southwestern arroyo; most of the time, though, he focuses on the blood, sex, hopes and doubts he views as human universals. (Sept.)