Shaving

Often a form for those seeking a diversion from the domineering lyric, the prose poem is here vigorously taken up by veteran poet and American Poetry Review editor Berg. Turning away from his recent Versions (improvised translations of other poems), and toward the autobiographical, Berg crafts self-investigations that are operatic in scope. In unparagraphed blocks of text that often run for pages, the poet obsesses about his relationships: to friends and former friends, his wife, his parents (troubled) and to the American poetic tradition. At one point, he muses over a voyeuristic encounter at his parents' bedroom door; in another, the poet traces his ambivalent feelings for a friend who has died of leukemia. In ""Lowell: Self-Portrait,"" he recalls a visit to his then teacher at MacLean hospital where the famous poet is recovering from a breakdown: ""it's like seeing myself in another, as another who watches me, a blanked-out unknown self sick with identity... I am not sure who I am or if I'm here, there's nothing inside/outside I can grab to anchor me."" (Freud, Auden, Cassavetes and Conrad make less intimate appearances elsewhere.) As their subject matter suggests, these are poems written by a poet in mid-life, mid-career attempting to survey his position in the world by triangulating it through others. At times, their length, detail and self-absorption are trying. Yet these arias of self-witness, 10 of which were published in New & Selected Poems (1992), are spirited departures for Berg; they deserve our attention and, often, our applause. (Oct.)