Edgy, and inventive, PW
reviews editor Scharf's poetry has been gaining attention in avant-garde circles for almost a decade, even though this is his first full-length book (Vérité
, a collection of more recent poems, was published online by Ubu.com). The sequences in the first half enmesh what could sound like personal revelations (even an "intense love promise") in a webwork of cultural quotations, literary history and free-floating postmodern headlines. "I was slightly excited / under the domination and guidance of a milk-/ white star," Scharf explains; elsewhere "disbelief about scatology / turns to eschatology, ontology." The sequence "Nine Sonnets for Late Nineties Literary Culture" performs a half-appreciative exorcism on the social contexts for poetry now, in poems with titles like "Recent Grad: Poem for the New Yorker," much in the tradition of Jack Spicer. Some of the volume's peaks arrive near the end, where chants, self-deconstructing sentences, celebrations of friends and investigations of social subtexts suggest the ambitious critique of work, time and meaning associated with England's Cambridge School. In this challenging and versatile debut, Scharf hits cultural bedrock. (July)
