Plasticville

Gathering a variety of traditional forms to ""capture the soul of plastic,"" Trinidad's ninth collection manages to be at once utterly deadpan and astonishingly fine. Only via Trinidad will Chatty Cathy enter a villanelle, or Garbo's troll collection find itself unveiled in terza rima. Yet Trinidad's high/low playfulness thoroughly displays a smart, sharp art of arrangement--be the subject ""Fat Liz / Bad Anne""; ""Barbie, Ken, Midge, Allan, and Skipper""; Marilyn Monroe's psyche; or 116 lines cribbed from everyone from Matthew Arnold to JamesWright. The book masterfully renders the obsessive aspects of popular culture-collectibility, relentless camp, larger-than-life power dynamics-and the odd way they reflect the poignant complexities of making choices. This is plainly evident in the many shorter poems on the vicissitudes of collecting, like ""Accessories"" (""comb,/ brush and `real' mirror"") or ""Fortunes"" (""You are just beginning to live""), and in ""Essay with Movable Parts,"" a long poem that intersperses images of the poet's nascent doll collection with subversively intelligent snapshots from a range of cheesy classics, including Valley of the Dolls and episodes of Gilligan's Island. A second long poem, ""Every Night, Byron"" is written from the perspective of the poet's lover's dog, hilariously summoning up The Autobiogrpahy of Alice B. Toklas as if written by Basket: ""David's packages in-/ terested me at first,/ until I realized they/ were full of the same/ old (as Ira calls it)/ `Barbie Crap' ./ David hemmed and/ hawed: `When/ words and people/ fail me, I have no/ choice but to take/ refuge in things.' Ira/ didn't buy it; neither/ did I."" This is Trinidad's finest work to date, and readers will do well to take refuge in its shiny, humane splendors, even if doubting the value of disposable culture in and of itself. (Mar.)