Through reviews in the New Yorker
, the New Republic
and elsewhere, Kirsch (The Wounded Surgeon
) has fast become one of the country’s best-known poetry critics, advocating self-control, formal mastery, rational argument and attention to the past, and praising poets from T.S. Eliot to Anthony Hecht to Frederick Seidel. Kirsch’s first book of poems struck many readers as apprentice work: this second effort—composed almost entirely of 16-line sonnets (like George Meredith’s)—comes far closer to the ideals set forth in his prose. Kirsch’s subjects include New York City (where he lives) before and after 9/11; other poets (“Wordsworth,” “Larkin,” “Palgrave’s Golden Treasury”); “hip-hop’s favorite furrier”; a “pet adoption booth”; and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which Kirsch views with grim and complicated regret: jet contrails at JFK airport, in one powerful sonnet, are “advertisements in the sky/ For a new kind of combat that requires/ Us only not to notice and ask why.” An interlude of stanzaic poems built around lines from the medieval writer Boethius saves the book from formal monotony and excess topicality. These efforts—highbrow deliberation in verse—are a lot like Hecht, and good enough to stand, poem by poem, on their own. (Apr.)
