New Titles in Poetry

This Disease
Author: Barry Silesky
Publisher: University of Tampa Press
Cloth $20.00 (88 p.)
ISBN: 1597320161
ISBN-13: 9781597320160
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The beautiful poems of This Disease are divided into three parts: "The System", "Spring Training", and "Nature". They are connected across these divisions by the death of a child, a crumbled first house and marriage, and most of all by Barry Silesky's attempt to discern a pattern in events real or imagined that would suggest that life, anyone's life, has meaning. The collection is arranged with genius, as references in one poem to the subject or thematic core of another act like hotlinks between them, illuminating both.

Silesky's lines are carefully wrought, whether he is walking the edge of the surreal or describing a climb to his roof that he must have written while standing on the ladder. His voice is real and compelling when he says, "I only want the geese, brandy, the swamp down the road from that house we built and lived in" (from "House Work"), and also when he says, "The three-year old shot by a drive-by could be the jungle that once covered the interstate" (from "Continental Drift").

The reader takes hope away from the reading of this book, though death and despair circle its subjects. In the darkness that gathers in the work like evening, the scarlet tanager appears and reappears as a representative of nature, the natural world that is an antidote to the mess humans make of their relationships, their minds, and their world. Yet Silesky does not idealize nature. Indeed, "gone back to Nature" as used in "Nature" is ironic, playing as it does with the implication of mortality and decay, alongside the yeasty suggestion of escape from convention. What is breathtaking about the consciousness that informs these poems is how present it is in every moment, no matter the context. It is that intense interest that carries the reader deep into the experience. Silesky has a quarrel with this life-he has titled the book This Disease, after all--but it is, to borrow a phrase, a lover's quarrel. In Silesky's work, the love shines through.