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The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind by Larissa Szporluk, Alice James Books, 2003, $13.95 cloth, ISBN 1882295390.
Larissa Szporluk's poems move by suggestion, allusion, and sleight-ofhand, techniques common in many poets of her generation. Rich in metaphors that have come unhitched, these poems abandon a logic of resemblance for figures in which vehicle and tenor no longer correspond in any strict or obvious sense. Their syntax is similarly impressionistic, abounding in unanchored pronouns, unplaceable appositions, and clauses derailed by changes of mind. For their many admirers, these poems provide a pleasure founded on the deferral or frustration of pleasure-a pleasure of slippage, missed connections, failed or obscured narratives; they provide the excitement of the surreal, of consenting to the illogic of an ever-shifting and ungraspable world. These are legitimate delights, and at their best Szporluk's poems are full not only of linguistic play and sonic effect, but also of human urgency, a bracing sense of terror, isolation, and need. But often these poems simply fail to cohere-fail even to struggle to cohere-and this third collection largely lacks the guarded self-revelation that gave Isolato, Szporluk's earlier effort, such force.
This is not to deny that on nearly...