New Titles in Poetry

Dark Alphabet
Author: Jennifer Maier
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Paper $14.95 (80 p.)
ISBN: 0809327260
ISBN-13: 9780809327263
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Here is a gifted poet at the start of what surely will be a noteworthy career. Jennifer Maier's Dark Alphabet is complex and engaging, alive with topical reference, and classic in its power to transport the reader out of the commonplace into the rare. Through Maier's deft use of metaphor, the reader starts in one place and ends up in another, organically, inevitably, but without any prefiguring, as these lines from "Postcard from the Moral High Ground" illustrate:

You may think you understand perspective,
but you don't-not until you've taken the long view,


fingered the wide thigh of the earth
up to the vanishing point.

In Dark Alphabet, perspective is key. A first collection that disdains navel-gazing, Dark Alphabet is highly engaged with American culture on subjects ranging from driving a car to Jeffrey Dahmer's father, but its scope is wider than the present day. The reader is drawn through the work by the way the poems light on and up incidents from history or legend, intrigued by what might next, from the dawn of time to the present, invite the poet's reflection. Iconic moments represented in "Eve's Menstruation," "Stone Tool," "Paris, 1936," and other of the poems, when summed, define us all, for Maier is grappling with the question of Man's moral evolution. The interim judgment (there will be more from Maier) merits the "dark" of the title.

Maier can do dark. Her tonal style, tending to be formal, lends gravitas to a poem like "Hymn to St. Agnes," which describes a martyrdom. Even as the girl is slaughtered, she continues to interpret experience in terms of her beliefs, and the reader, who feels a knife in his own throat, is convinced, through Maier's art, not of the truth of the girl's beliefs but of her true experience of them. But this is no one-note collection. The same formal tone gives a mock-heroic hilarity to "Post Hoc," a witty assemblage of common sayings greater than the sum of its parts, and mischief to the opening of "Afternoon with Frank O'Hara," the highly quotable "O Frank O'Hara O Frank O'Hara…."

More, please!