Reckoner/Skating with Mother Grace

...the wild language — "O abstinence of my corpulent debauches,/and satchel of my chanting./turbulence of my decimated bandana" — makes the reader feel winded...

...Lynch's willingness to continue, rather than short-circuit, a thought means that his best poems will be his longest...

...But is there such a thing a common sense...

...Argyle seems a combination of John Berryman's Henry, and the Jackie Gleason character from ' 'The Honeymooners'' — as Ronald Firbank would have it, "gorged with pickings...

...When the government's words for danger no longer signify danger, but disguise it, then surrealist poetry reenacts that linguistic dishonesty in order to undermine its doublethink...

...The "drainboard'' and the "clothesline'' are pieces of that Eden's apparatus: paraphernalia of the lost housekeeper, the lost house...

...An illusion of wisdom comes with his distinctive line — a line with so few pauses that we are catapulted to its end without a breath's respite...

...Jenny of the glade, of the inlet, of the shoals, can she remember the hot sulphur springs...

...Ululating ninnies,' "figurine enchilada," "umpteen laryn gitis": in this thicket, we grope for com mon sense...

...Maybe it was the quiet or the dark or dreamless sleep that sent him from the land out of Moveen with his tin footlocker — three weeks at sea in a cheerless steerage with Mike and Tommy, the priest I'd be named for, and Brigid, the Mrs., who was big that time — fat with the makings of my grandfather...

...The air of Tate's poem is thin because the world's air is thin...

...The volume opens with an epigraph from Wallace Stevens's 506: Commonweal "The Man on the Dump": Tate does not celebrate the dump, but, recognizing that our civilization is disassembled, that our public life is in ruins, he cites dislocations as evidence of a nostalgia, a longing for the hill town pictured on the cover, for the "dainty frippery of childhood" that keens beneath the "decomposing zones" of his poems...

...These lines, from "The Sin-Eater," exemplify the celerity and particularity of Lynch's best poems: But still they sent for him and sat him down amid their whispering contentments to make his table near the dead man's middle, and brought him soda bread and bowls of beer and candles which he lit against the reek that rose off that impenitent cadaver though bound in skins and soaked in rosewater...

...Often, his lines rhyme, but irregularly, with an American, anti-establishment cheerfulness...

...Wayne Koestenbaum Aphotograph of an Italian hill town, on the cover of James Tate's Reckoner, represents the polis that his surrealism strives to reconstruct...

...I am throwing snowballs at the roadmap," Tate writes, responding to regulation and totalitarian design (the roadmap) with a futile, antic gesture (throwing snowballs) that is secretly vatic...

...By writing frequently in the first person, Tate gives us the comforting sense that there is an "I" at the poem's center, that in this chaos, someone is awake, someone is registering...

...Take a typically playful and apparently nonsensical passage from Reckoner: Jenny, Jenny of the surveillance walkie-talkies, and what about the drainboard and the clothesline, huh...

...The "glade," "inlet," and "shoals" resonate with the almost cartographical vocabulary of the poems: everywhere we find references to "streets," "a village near Bosnia," "Toledo," "Westport," "pyramids," "skyscrapers...

...Weirdly jocular, with an idiot savant's wit, his poems commit none of the damage they record...

...For all their scatter-brained variety, sometimes the poems seem too much alike...

...What the book offers us, in lieu of the extraordinary, are facts of a regular life presented with such velocity that — as the expertly-scanned, jauntily-iambic lines speed past us — we almost feel that swiftness itself conveys a profundity...

...Swift, fulminous, colloquial, Lynch's poems leave a taste of mulch in the mouth...

...If i were not for "the thick vines/and fer mentation of a national crisis," he could return to a now-inaccessible languag where codes were not necessary...

...Searching in his work for tokens of his privileged understanding of death, I was disappointed to find few new insights...

...I can't pick up the vacuum cleaner without remembering our most subtle and tender moments, shooing the sniper from the playground, then picking watermelons...

...Several fine poems feature a contemplation-provoking creature named Argyle, who feeds on the sins of the dead...

...A figure not of punishment but of purification, Argyle eats the errors the dead leave behind them...

...Who is the reckoner of the title if not James Tate himself — the wakeful poet who counts "every little grain of sand...

...It is a far distance from Argyle to the Eumenides, but Lynch's vigorous and somehow 1980s neo-optimistic verse provides us with adages, like "A good death, even when it kills you, is/ nonetheless some better than a bad one," which warm us with their reasonableness...

...In a poem of that span, we stumble upon a line — "everything that breathes requires death" — with a sense of having made a miraculous discovery...

...Is Tate locked within his manner...

...surrealism borrows its techniques from Newspeak...

...What seems to shadow this imaginary, only half-drawn city, is the unnamed nuclear catastrophe, most precisely etched in "Smart and Final Iris": Pentagon code for end of world is rural paradise, if plan fails it's rural paradise . . . Pentagon's code is Tate's code, too...

...The jacket copy of his first book of poems, Skating with Heather Grace, announces his 11 September 1987: 507 profession as if it had a particular bearing on the way we read his poems — as if it were not just a curious detail, but a credential...

...We are encouraged to believe that, in the tradition of William Carlos Williams, the man who in his daily work confronts the dead and dying will be a finer instrument, registering tragedy more honestly...

...in "Learning Gravity," a long, ambitious, variegated poem, he has the space to weld together the deaths of Theodore Roethke, J.F.K., and a cousin from Ireland...

...Tat writes from a situation of nightmare - and it is language that is having th nightmare...

...For the past few months my life has read like canned-food labels caked with panic...

...For losses under 100 million, a trip on the wayward bus For a future of mutants, bridal parties collide World famine is a plague of beatniks Thomas Lynch, poet, makes his living as an undertaker...

...The "surveillance walkie-talkie" is a fragment of the Orwellian world that has replaced the lost American Eden of Jenny's forgotten "hot sulphur springs...

...the formalism that gilds his verse allows him to be down-home in diction...

...Tate's "I" is a familiar figure — like Kafka's Joseph K., placed in circumstances beyond his comprehension...

...His ear is the ear of Irish poets like Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon...