A micronarratologist, or perhaps a very short historian, could trace the whole course of twentieth-century literary interpretation in the gradual embarrassment of the word "about." It used to go everywhere, in an unbashful nakedness; now it spends half its life shrouded in scare quotes, like an orphan in rags, or Jacob Marley in shackles, and the other half hiding behind some prudent euphemism: so a poem about nature becomes first a poem "about" nature, and then a poem that explores the idea of nature, and then a poem whose inquiry into the genre of pastoral bears an ironic relation to what it is ostensibly "about." Of course a preposition is rarely chastised without reason, and the apple cannot be uneaten, and to plug one's ears and hum over all the philosophers since Diderot never got anyone far. But it would be equally foolish to pretend, if we care for the power of poetry, that nothing has been lost.

This is the difficulty in which Peter Gizzi's new book begins. Without denying or attempting to evade the complexities of the modern position, it longs for a lyric simplicity, for a lapsed idea of an art that, as Gizzi writes, "can say how I am feeling." It would be perfectly accurate to say that Gizzi's book "interrogates the lyric tradition," but his work is so sensitive to the possibilities of the tradition it interrogates that I would rather write: this is an attempt to lure "about" out from under its quotation marks.

Or more precisely: it is the dramatization of the attempt. Gizzi can write with moving ingenuousness about the immediate experience of poetry: "A specific word so spoken / will do," he says, and he looks for

   courage to accept the facts
that poetry can catch you in the headlights
and it's years refocusing the afterimage,
the depth and passion of its earnest glance.

He can mourn the vocabulary of the beautiful ("ailanthus, rosebud, gable / saturnalia, moonglow, remember,") and one of his most persistent metaphors imagines the lyric voice calling back from the "other side" of a romantic transformation:

every thing is poetry here

a vast blank fronting the eyes
more sparkling than sun on brick
October's crossing-guard orange

This poem, part of a long sequence on the history of the lyric, is called "The ethics of dust"; and here October's autumnal crossing-guard has ferried the speaker from summer to winter, from life to death. The voice of the poem, having transcended the poet's earthly existence, speaks from a kind of afterlife where "every thing is poetry."

But if Gizzi's sifting through the lyric tradition can sometimes sound nostalgic, it is kept from sentimentality by a critical intellect which is not content to listen to the book's vulnerable core. Gizzi's destabilizing techniques—grammatical slippage, extreme compression, insistent repetition, and an extensive compilation of literary and nonliterary allusions (to lines from Stevens, Belle & Sebastian songs, Man With the Movie Camera)—so characterize these poems that they shape their thematic argument. The frequency with which the book undermines determinate meaning in favor of a kind of highly tuned connotative field suggests, ultimately, that the terms of the romantic lyric can only be entered obliquely, in a kind of intensely analytical trance. A poem about love, from a section called "Fin Amor," begins in a kind of derangement:

    If love if then if now if the flowers of if the conditional
if of arrows the condition of if
    if to say light to inhabit light if to speak if to live, so
    if to say it is you if love is if your form is if your waist
that pictures the fluted stem of lavender

Gizzi's repertoire of effects is limited enough that this bardic-deconstructionist tone eventually wears quite thin. On an individual level the poems are often uneven, and there are failed experiments which appear to have been included entirely for thematic reasons. But the seriousness of Gizzi's enterprise, his willingness to ask stricken questions of a stricken poetry, and his moments of unnerving beauty achieve something remarkable for this strange and difficult book, in which "Paradox asks so much from us / we often experience it as grace."

— Brian Phillips