POETS’ CORNER

Belongings

Poems

Sandra M. Gilbert

W.W. Norton: 112 pp., $23.95

The title of Sandra M. Gilbert’s new collection, “Belongings,” is perfect for this collection of fierce, grieving poems, these dark and bright elegiac celebrations that include haunting sequences of sonnets. What belongs to us and to whom we belong -- our possessions and what possesses us -- are Gilbert’s lyrical obsessions. She moves from the luminous tenacity of the word “belonging” itself -- coupling the verb “to be,” to exist, with the word “longing” (how we exist in a state of desire and projection) -- to the reiterated impossibility of holding on to our own lives and loves. Yet the poems eloquently describe the individual struggle to keep the objects and narratives of our existence, the attempt to shore up material and memories against the inevitability of loss, death and destruction.

Don’t let my belongings

go astray

call the super tell the

doorman keep

the windows locked and

barred the crooks away

the ones who break and

enter when you sleep

Poems about her Sicilian origins, poems for her children, poems for a husband who has died -- yet still living in the imagination (as in the melancholy, Whitmanesque poem “Daddy Long Legs, Dawdling” ) -- flow into each other:

how once on long

fine legs, with certain

steps you walked ...

And, beyond melancholy, in the pitched terror of mortality, she paints a pure hell made of our helplessness in the face of the randomness of annihilation:

... a minute

just a single one

before the hail of arrows

rises, hisses, flashes

into the flowers, the flesh.

The driving spirit of inquiry here takes the quest of the Romantics to heart (the reader hears Shelley in the unraveling winds, the “simmering fields” and brooding animal masks) all the way to the lighter poems of a section called “A Little Night Music.” These are poems both implacable and powerful, at home in the imagination’s twin processes of being and longing.

The Girl With Bees in Her Hair

Eleanor Rand Wilner

Copper Canyon Press: 110 pp., $15

The distinguished poet Eleanor Rand Wilner’s “The Girl With Bees in Her Hair,” a “choral work of the imagination,” reintroduces the gods, old and new, and the Muses, born again:

Who sings to the dying,

who wraps

in her shawl the charred

lexicon left

on the steps of the ruined

library

next to the toppled

stone lion --

The use of myths and mythologies is by no means a new approach in the articulation of these (or any other) poems. Wilner predictably casts divine identities as elemental forces and passions.

Yet these intertwining “arias” sung by immortals, demi-gods and human voices offer a brave new view of Olympus and the suffering mortal world below.

Even the lowly sparrow is enlisted in an investigation of “pure dread” of the war-torn world:

... the mind can’t hold for

long

the sparrow and the bomber

in a single thought.

Elegy and protest are wed here. Wilner is an activist-poet, that rare (and often disastrous) combination of sensibilities. In this case, the poet’s vision gives rise to jittery heroes and free-floating innovation.

Streets in Their Own Ink

Stuart Dybek

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 76 pp., $20

Memories of childhood and youth drive these tough yet smoky blue poems by Stuart Dybek. Throughout his book, we stay in the same neighborhood of syncopated longing and (for better or worse) an unrelenting nostalgia. The streets here ink themselves into the reader’s memory forever:

... by noon

the streets were ordinary --

lampposts, sparrows, sewers --

but we knew behind the light

there were other streets ...