Poetry critics should agree to a moratorium on the word "mandarin." Like "suburban," "confessional," or "self-styled avant-garde," the label smears the poets while allowing the critics to keep their hands clean. Because of his eloquence and formal grace, J. D. McClatchy has often had to wear this dubious badge. But the "m" word would be especially inappropriate to Hazmat, the poet's fifth collection. Named after the abbreviation for "hazardous materials," the book examines the spaces where Eros wheels and deals with Thanatos, attraction meets repulsion, and beauty falls to disease. McClatchy plunges his poems in these acid baths, it seems to me, because he needs to find what endures. And by maintaining his prosodic finish, he takes his place in an enduring line, a group of writers who both respect the reader's taste for style and manage to rankle him somewhere in the intestines.

Consider McClatchy's own "Tattoos," the tour de force at the center of Hazmat. The poem is a triptych: the first and third sections tell specific stories of tattooing, while the second takes the theme of ornament as an occasion to address mortality itself. Here are the last, syllabic lines of that address:

   Everything's exposed to no purpose.
The tears leave no trace of their grief on my face.
   My gifts are never packaged, never
Teasingly postponed by the need to undo
   The puzzled perfections of surface.
All over I am open to whatever
   You may make of me, and death soon will,
Its unmarked grave the shape of things to come,
   The page there was no time to write on.

The play between end-stopped and enjambed lines, the hidden rhyming, the Audenesque cascade of exempla—to some readers, this elegance may seem to belie the subject of death. Yet the pleasure of reading Hazmat comes not only from listening to the poet match various registers of speech to the textures of the world around him, but also from catching the counterpoint he often strikes between matter and manner. In the first section of "Tattoos," for example, McClatchy begins in the harsh demotic of drunken sailors headed for a "tat shack," then reaches an almost Shelleyan crescendo. In several of his "Motets," he allows moments of nightmarish violence to unsettle the surface of that series. In "Ouija," an homage to James Merrill, he adopts his predecessor's style and method, while never losing his own inflections.

Everywhere in Hazmat, McClatchy brilliantly modulates tone and pitch, while continuing to sound his dual pedalnotes of beauty and decay. But I would like to point to "Glanum" as a lyric which deserves special admiration. McClatchy names the poem after a town in Provence, whose Roman ruins he captures in expert trimeter couplets. Here is one passage from the poem, a description which slides into allegory without ever becoming over-determined:

A single carving remains
The plunder never claimed,
And no memories of guilt
Can wear upon or thrill
This scarred relief of a man
And woman whom love will strand,
Their faces worn away,
Their heartache underplayed,
Just turning as if to find
Something to put behind
Them, an emptiness
Of uncarved rock, an excess
Of sharp corrosive doubt.

The image of the couple turning back toward the emptiness suggests how McClatchy's own classicism never slips into self-assured posturing; the sculptor's "sharp corrosive" doubt has touched every line in this book. Neither does the work lose its poise. This poet's instrument is so finely tuned that he can deliver a complex sensation and idea with a single enjambment: the movement of "Something to put behind / Them, an emptiness" conveys that sinking feeling he describes. And if the moment reaches into nothingness, it also borders on wonder.

— Peter Campion