Modern Poetry

Seuss (Frank: Sonnets) lends her mordant wit and incisive vision to this poetry-focused sixth collection. Her deadpan levity refuses piousness, even as she deals head-on with a feeling of being “never again at home in the world” and a sense that “I have camped/ at this outpost my whole life.” Seuss’s comic talent bristles and undercuts sentimentality. She comments as she goes, often on the very construction and thoughts which drive her “breathless/ deathless, feckless little song.” There is an urge toward self-laceration in these pages (“I looked like a Rubens/ painting of a woman half-eaten/ by moths”), but she applies these same unsparing, scalpel-like strokes to “the murdered world” and to poetry itself. There are several essayistic poems discussing craft and the artistry of verse: “There is a poetry of rage and a poetry of hope,” she notes, while refusing to settle for easy platitude. “Who wants anyone/ else’s hands on their pain?” she asks, challenging simplistic self-help solutions. “Don’t be the savior, be the stain.” These irreverent, pulsing, and defiant poems are full of dangerous good sense. (Mar.)