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fall on the brick in the backyard,
the plum-colored shade of the round
table full of holes
dropping its disks of light
onto the anthills.
PARTISAN REVIEW
Agoos has the courage to write plainly, as in the above pas–
sage, but the writing is never dull. Her language is simple, sen–
suous, and concrete, with a quiet lyricism that approaches radiance
in her best work.
Michael Collier writes in the tradition of "gentle" poetry one
associates with Herbert, cultivating a quiet voice which nevertheless
understands that "the price of pain
I
is pain," as he says in the
opening poem, "Ancestors." In
The Clasp,
his first volume, he
explores diverse emotional and geographical landscapes, arguing
over and again in different ways that we are "connected by desire,
I
the common kind, as in being one with your blood." Whether
writing about his grandfather's death in "Elegy" or recalling his
father's experience ofwar in "The Point of No Return," he exudes
affection, an affection that spills over to a love of objects, natural
and artificial, as in the poise of "Aquarium, " where he
contemplates "Blue scuba tanks striped with yellow" as well as the
woman who moves through the water, wiping the glass and
cleaning the "fake coral with a long boot brush."
Reading "Aquarium," I was reminded of Julio Cortazar 's
"Axolotl," the story about a man so obsessed with stran·ge crea–
tures in a fish tank that, in the end, he becomes one of them. In
The Clasp,
·Collier is similarly obsessed with transformations,
disappearances, and recurrences, as in the haunting "Eyepiece,"
which concludes:
In a few weeks
I
was
too sullen to live with,
and like the moon
that disappeared from the eyepiece
at my neighbor's house
we couldn't be restored.
