Pleasure

Teare won acclaim last year with Sight Map. This new collection (his third) is more unified, responding to the death of a lover, from AIDS. Throughout the first half, long lines and long sentences envision the departed lover as Adam, and their lost love as a lost garden—"I couldn't speak of this/ and yet Adam found me the way language/ changed... gladly he lent his mouth,/ gave tongue to each new skin." When Teare is not praising the body he is writing almost too self-consciously about his own poetic goals: "I call him still because lyric/ like gardens, courts the senses/ through form." The fragmentary elegies and recollected stories of the second half prove less predictable: in one standout, the California coast is a "shell/ hell in which the sea kneels/ tongue--bang// and serenade." Teare's loss feels real: his intensity of attention cannot be denied. And yet the poems may not add much, formally or creatively, to the rich store of work on similar topics completed a decade ago, by (among others) Timothy Liu and D.A. Powell. Interviews reveal that Teare assembled this collection between his first and second books; readers eager for his newest work will have longer to wait. (Sept.)