The Little Book of Guesses

This isn't the most earthshaking book of poetry to cross my desk this month but it has its considerable virtues. It's not accessible the way William Carlos Williams' poetry is, but it shares with WCW an appreciation for the thingness of things, the nitty-gritty substance of life you can crush between your fingers. Maybe that's its best quality, a closeness to the real. Vaguely futuristic at times--the sort of futurism that feels hazy, as though its maker hadn't really thought it out--Gallaher's BOOK OF GUESSES is strong on concept and, through some miracle of verbal sympathy, planes itself as it goes along, so that it grows leaner and leaner like three generations of birch in a single wood. The relaxed middle class gesture, the enervation of follow through, John Ashbery has made this world his own, but he has leased large chunks of it to John Gallaher in what seems like perpetuity. The difficulty of the poetry aside, Gallaher stages a ceremonial sacrifice of suburbia, while his (first-name-only) couples demonstrate the horrors of heterosexuality like Martha and George in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Here they're not as openly contemptuous of each other as must as they are banal--the author wields contempt like a spatula. Actually there's a sort of bemusement too, a milder form of contempt, as though to say, "Bob and Carol, George and Margo, Ted and Nancy, Peter and Jenny, Adam and Rosie are all sort of adorable in their ineffectuality and pain." Echoes of Auden here in Gallaher's investigative stance towards the crime of being suburban, the Auden interested in crime who morphed into Ross Macdonald. "Whose cigarette/ in the plaid ashtray?/ / Whose clothes on the coffee table/ as the dog begins to bark?" This must be the dog that did nothing whatsoever in the nighttime. "Have you seen it?/ A little spot of blood./ A little spot of blood on the horizon?" The quietly creepy is Gallaher's forte He gives a key to his method when he has the speaker of "Campfire Girls at Sunrise Hill" admit, "It was horrible. But that's just/ words. I could just as easily/ have said wonderful." This so hit home for me, who was wondering why he didn't call his book THE BIG BOOK OF GUESSES--what would have been the difference? Perhaps the word "little" accentuates the pathos, while shepherding his audience away from Ozymandian monumentality. I'm a sucker for his brand of gentle undercutting, so that when my feet don't have any ground left under them, I get physically dizzy and a little excited. It's not the poetry of a very young man, but it has stretches and swoops of acrobatic daring, I might almost say bravery. The judge of the contest this book won, Henri Cole, says it is a world where "things are quietly disintegrating." That's a sharp way of putting it, but it's a little misleading, for Gallaher is a poet of nurture as well. Things come together as well as fall apart. It's not all social satire and poking fun at the bourgeoisie, there's an