What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

In this comprehensive and essential retrospective, the body of work left behind by Stanford—who took his own life in 1978, at age 29—more than makes good on his insistence that “poetry busts guts.” The volume presents a vital and distinctly American surrealist impulse, as Stanford, whose legacy is somewhat obscured by his extensive self-mythologizing, fearlessly explored the terror and wonder of the mind and the physical world. Published and unpublished poems coexist alongside excerpts from his 15,000-line epic, “Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,” as well as selected bits of energetic prose and other ephemera. In the course of reading, one witnesses the prismatic and visionary effects of his imagination on a richly figured world of Southern objects—knives, rivers, boats, cypress trees—where the moon can be everything from “a dead man floating down the river” to “dead fish” to the “blind eye of a fish/ in the back of a cave.” What he sings here is a “song that comes apart/ Like a rosary/ In the back of a church”—an unlikely triumph of imagination over pain and death. Stanford demanded of poetry that it “mean and sing,” and this is the definitive document of his uncanny ability to do just that. (Apr.)