New Titles in Poetry

Taking the Occasion
Author: Daniel Brown
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Cloth $22.50 (59 p.)
ISBN-13: 9781566638012
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My seven-year experience of being allowed by my generous company to browse new titles in the stacks of our home warehouse here at YBP has led me to conclude that there is low interest on the part of contemporary poets in working in formal patterns of meter and rhyme. This is no revelation; I've made the same observation in educational settings from grade school to grad school. I have some sympathy for the trend, having been raised in a home that included my mother's inspirational magazine. This monthly contained, alongside glam nature photographs, truly terrible poems that clunked along in iambs and depended upon inverted word order for the survival of rhyme schemes in which, implausibly to my ear, the word again was somehow supposed to rhyme with rain. For many Americans, the old poets are dead twice over. It is not so much form that doesn't suit, but form's long-standing association with a dated sound.

Enter Daniel Brown. Taking the Occasion is the eighth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize, a prize awarded to a poet working in traditional forms. But reading these poems, you lose sight of the form almost at once, as Brown engages you immediately in conversation. His choice of words is right over the plate every time, whether speaking directly or metaphorically, using slang, or enlarging the language with words of his own invention. These 37 poems engage the heart through the mind. Brown is not afraid to tell a story, or state a premise. With wit and grace and a deep-seated gratitude for, as he calls them, the blessings of life, Brown shares his take on love, aging, the mind of man, the "creation" of God, works of art, and the works of individual artists, including Blake, Monet, and an anonymous Greyhound bus driver, "…one whose works are written on the air…." Deep in the background of the lively play of words and ideas, surfacing sometimes only at the end to underscore his conclusions, is the meter or the rhyme not noticed until then, and sometimes not noticed then, but felt instead. In Brown's poetry, form is not a vehicle, but a power source.