Routine Disruptions

Kenward Elmslie's poetry has won him many fans over the years, but this book, adeptly edited by W.C. Bamberger, reveals not only the range but the depth of a superb talent. What I admire most about Elmslie is the risk and daring of his poetic project. Sometimes the mood is bleakly sad, sometimes ironic, sometimes sweet, bitter or blue, for here is a poet willing to engage in history, spectacle, emotion. When William Carlos Williams defined poetry as the "machine made of words," could he have been predicting, like Nostradamus, this mad, clean, incisive orgasmatron? Always he's polyphonous, always musical, on the order of Finnegans Wake-volleys of voices, high and demotic, flash through these pages like strobe light or religious fervor. The magic's in its own making, and in his readers' relation to an energy and abjection so vital, controlled, so air-borne. Elmslie's new Selected Poems will confirm his standing as one of the premier postmodern experimentalists of our time.