Stake: Poems, 1972-1992

For accomplished formalist Corn, writing has always been inextricable from autobiography, and this collection lets us survey the long-term results of these often mutually antagonistic obsessions. Like James Merrill and Richard Howard, Corn, who is also an art critic, frequently reflects on a life of travel at home and abroad, lingering among intellectual haunts, domestic comforts as well as exotic pleasures. His intellectualism makes offering fresh views on weathered scenes a constant pressure; in an excerpt from the book-length Notes from a Child of Paradise, for example, a trip to the Grand Canyon strands the poet in the third-person plural, ""staggered, trying then also/ To find words that would fall in love with what they saw."" But self-consciousness is not enough to make some of these stories matter: the volume's finale, selections from the long poem ""1992"" (a series of two-part ""on-the-road"" tales the poet calls ""the content of the world that is my case"") embodies the shortcomings of his methods: its personal anecdotes of cross-country trips, alternated with snapshots of imagined lives of ordinary people (a waitress at a touristy diner in Tampa, for example), more easily generate sentiment than sympathy or insight: ""Trees rushing by,/ a sinking sun caught in them. Wordlessness,/ more than anything else, was how we communicated."" In many earlier poems, however, particularly on New England and New York, the poet responds to his surroundings with eccentricity and courage, and without the predictability of much of the later work. (Nov.)