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Vita Nova, by Louise Glick. The Ecco Press. $22.00.
The Dreamhouse, by Tom Sleigh. University of Chicago Press. $12.00.
The Surface of Last Scattering, by Gray Jacobik. Texas Review Press. $12.00.
Reign of Snakes, by Robert Wrigley. Penguin. $14.95. Actual Air, by David Berman. Open City Books. $12.95. Night Battle, by William Logan. Penguin. $iS.95.
Form and clarity, those Apollonian virtues run off the road by faster traffic during the i96os, '70s, and '80s, have reemerged in poetry. Today's verse often features classical contours. Even unity and coherence are back, the more ambitious poetry releases showing design, not just assemblage. But what retro fetish has so many poets hitching their verse to the dray horse of classical mythology? Yes, the Greek deities and Roman heroes are timeless; yes, their narratives, retold in new ways by new generations, continue to reveal us to ourselves-or however the blurb on the latest edition of Bulfinch's reads. And yes, vivid and probing re-creations of ancient myths continue to be written. Frank Bidart's resurrection, in Desire (1997), of the ancient romance of Myrrha and Cinyras ("The Second Hour of the Night") is only one recent example. But enough, already. "I have lost my Eurydice" ("Orfeo"), writes Louise Gluck in Vita Nova. (Her alternate personas include Eurydice, Dido, and Bellerophon.) Gray Jacobik, in The Surface of Last Scattering, presents portraits of "Demeter in November" and "Psyche." Robert Wrigley, in Reign of Snakes, writes of putting on "Arachne's prideful cloak" ("Amazing Grace"). Tom Sleigh's The Dreamhouse is awash in Homerian luminaries. Even the modernist William Logan (Night Battle) seems to sense that a bow to the classics is de rigueur-though he maintains a sense of humor while anteing up. His "Niobe" turns Greek myth into Southern Gothic, even as "Blues for Penelope," with its refrain of "Ulysses, honey, when you coming home?" reconceives the Odyssey as a Bessie Smith lyric.
Logan's poems succeed by making an old thing new. To make a new thing old, on the other hand-to dress a contemporary or personal theme in Achaean robes-is riskier business. A poem got up in such garb can seem overdressed or fusty. And if the substance of the poem is less than archetypal, the poem may stagger under the archetype it invokes....