THE VULNERABILITY OF ORDER

Playful, linguistically nuanced and jaggedly jazzed, the poems of Bellen's third collection come at an old philosophical problem with the very latest aesthetic tools. The various series of lyrical fragments and abstracted aphorisms here are pitched toward the capital "O" "Order" of the title, in the sense of wanting to gently blow down teleology's house of cards. As Bellen's speaker puts it in "Cuccina": "The most beautiful order is still/ A random collection/ of things insignificant in themselves." Bellen (Tales of Murasaki) revels in Stevensian riddles and red-herrings ("If every butterfly were smoke, would all perception/ Fall to smell? If every wing were paper-white, would// All perception end in sight?") and doggerel-based silliness: "Please, oh please, spread something sweet/ Over my shredded wheat// That rests upon this yellow plate,/ fired in the biscuit state." The latter mode works toward irony in some poems ("Perennials"), while falling flat in others ("For the Saturday Evenings Girls' Pottery Club"). Yet the more serious pieces contain zen-like assertions: "God rests in the odd/ Clamor." The Joyce lift ("God is a shout in the street") and pun on "odd" are just two of this line's trajectories, distracting enough to make readers forget the problem at hand. (June)