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The cold reveals everything …
two dogs chained to a fencepost sleeping
on bare dirt, brown smoke and ash
rising from the rusted oil barrel
where my brother and I are burning
the wrapping paper
behind my grandmother's shed.

Every year we do this, every year
scuffing at the gravel and coal chips
to keep warm, until we are called
for dinner.

And every year I look closer
into his clear, unhindered face
and think that we are finally growing older—
one of us

still saved by the blood of the lamb,
one still waiting for the dumb to speak.

It was while reading Crunk that I began to see that, because poetry is so very condensed, it reveals the personality of the writer more starkly than any other form of writing does. In this stack of books, different poets examine similar topics. There are poems about sex, poems about landscape, even several about watching someone sleep. What you like or dislike about these poems reflects what you'd like or dislike about the people who wrote them. (In litcrit land, that's heresy, I know, even more crudely retrograde than the intentional fallacy. Just call us Mr. and Mrs. Philistine.)

Madonna anno domini
by Joshua Clover
Louisiana State Univ., 1997
68 pp.; $19.95

A collection of poetry books is like a collection of people at a party. You might want to go stand by Tony Crunk, though he probably wouldn't talk much. Over in the corner, Jorie Graham is impressing people by breaking cement blocks with her forehead. Other poets are fluting about their traumas, making catty remarks, or otherwise exhibiting core traits.

Joshua Clover, for example, is being a jackass, but a very clever one. Bogen would have good advice for him, suggesting in her passage on simile-versus-metaphor that "'How like a jackass I am' lacks the pizazz of 'What a jackass I am.' " But one can only write about what one knows, and we suspect that Clover does not yet know this.

"Did you get a load of his photo?" Gary asks, and I did; the jacket flap of Madonna anno domini shows him standing bare-chested before a mountain range, blond and sunglassed, unbuttoned flannel shirt flapping in the breeze. Perhaps this is left over from some previous career dream of being a supermodel. Perhaps he turned to poetry for consolation.

I doubt it consoles anybody else. The jacket copy tells us that "Madonna anno domini is a sacrament for the twilight of the atomic age, a hellish Interzone with 'God in abeyance' where dazed speakers search through the vertigo of negation for love and belief." That, or maybe you could just see if there's anything good on tv.

But against our wishes, Gary and I found ourselves enjoying it. Clover's poems are poprocks of image and intellect, frequently showoffy, but nevertheless infectious. "I had a little desert, I kept it in the study, / it was a few inches across, like a hand mirror, / it moved a few inches at a time, like an ice age," is the pleasing delicate rhythm that begins "Bathtub Panopticon."

Sometimes Clover reminded me of early Dylan liner notes: "Zaffer, baby, milori, cŽleste, the sky so blue-colored / it's almost blue & you falling away from the world / into description" ("Blue Louise"), or

There must be the sense that in
the next
moment one can
head off
in any direction when one can
in fact turn only to
the west
murmuring 'how lovely
the west is' even though it is lovely
as the painters constantly remind us
with their famously winsome strata
of ceramic azul and cochineal
if you like that sort
of thing.
Then one day both armies
pass through town
traveling
in the same direction
—"Remarks on the Word Lucrative"

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