HAUNT

Keith Waldrop, HAUNTKeith Waldrop

The themes of life's ephemerality and language's tragicomic trailing after it are familiar to readers of Waldrop, a translator of Anne-Marie Albiach and Edmond Jabès and the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including the selected The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander. The border between the abstract and the concrete is sharply drawn in these poems, if only to be continuously bridged, or to dwell on the ramifications of their contact: "An aging house, well yes he/ understands that but suddenly/ down it falls." The odd sparse prose accrues to form three major sections: "Indication," "Between the Straits" and "Potential Random." Waldrop is able to move the work through propositions that would undermine a less mature use of tonal slippages, unreliable narration and contradictions of the "there is no everything" sort. One gets the sense, in poems like "Indication," of stepping into ongoing processes for taking hold of ideas, dreams and even reality: "idea by idea/ my body regains its/ argument." One of the book's interlocutors may be the British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, who once observed that "We think in generalities, but we live in details." How the details of feeling mingle with our conceptions of the world provide Waldrop with a window on a life "new every morning" and make for a writing that is a kind of cenotaph to itself, able only to haunt existence rather than to fully take it up. (May 1)

Forecast:Along with spouse Rosemarie Waldrop (A Key into the Language of America), Waldrop has taught for many years in Brown University's writing program and copublishes Burning Deck books—celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. This book will certainly reach the small-press community; review attention, for which Waldrop is overdue, could get it into more stores and make a collected more likely.

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Reviewed on: 04/16/2001

Genre: Poetry