Jake Berry – Brambu Drezi (Station Hill Press, 2006)
Jake Berry, reclusive poet, songwriter, musician, and visual artist of Florence, Alabama, has worked for two decades on Brambu Drezi. The new Station Hill edition presents the first three volumes of Brambu Drezi. (Berry has begun work on a video-based fourth volume.) Brambu Drezi is an overwhelming reading experience – a generative site for colliding mythologies, perspectives, culture, visions, decompositions, and recyclings, complete with superb drawings by Berry – not illustrations, but drawings that are inextricably part of the journey, part of the ciphering and deciphering. The work moves from a kind of talking in tongues to the most lyrical of moments, from mythic encounters to mundane cinematic scenes. With Berry as medium – the poet as the site or gathering point for the text – we are given a work that rewards reading and re-reading. To learn more about Berry’s varied work, go to http://9thstlab.blogspot.com

Dave Brinks – Caveat Onus – Book One: Meditations One Thru Fifty-Two (Lavender Ink, 2006)
Bar owner, activist, poet, and community leader, Dave Brinks has written a remarkable four-book cycle, The Caveat Onus, in a surreal, visionary mode in the peculiar world that is post-Katrina New Orleans. Written figured re-configured – hallucination dream nightmare meditation – balm petition judgment & redemption, Dave Brinks’ Caveat Onus arrives in the post-Katrina post-apocalyptic New Orleans tragedy called by the government a “recovery.” Brinks, though, locates a source: “a voice speaks to you/ from oblivion/ whose mouths are zero-shaped/ and all in the key of blue.” From this ancient tune, Brinks makes use, as poetry must, of all available wisdom and engages in the difficult discipline of considered attention so that “out of this dead city/ you carved yourself free and awoke.” In a city where shortly after Katrina “grey line passengers/ are paying $35 to see the destruction,” Brinks believes “this slender hour comes forward/ to see what can be salvaged.” Caveat Onus comes forward to help show us a way onward for a city and a nation in peril.

Duriel Harris – Drag (Elixir Press, 2003)
Musician, scholar, singer, sound-artist, Duriel Harris has written an amazing first book. As Sterling Plumpp tells it (correctly!), “Drag is a twenty-first century literary text emerging out of the prism of race, gender, and social class. It is eloquently postmodern funk and intimately original.” Recently, I had the pleasure of hearing Duriel read/perform, and I immediately thought, hallelujah, what bold adventurous funky informed rich poetry. In this her first collection of poetry, Duriel Harris lays claim to the forward movement (an informed forward movement) of works such as Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge. Duriel Harris’s work is as adventurous on the page as it is musically and in performance: “Backwater, yeah, but I ain’t wet, so misters, I ain’t studin’ you:/ Don’t need your blessed doctrine to tell me what to write and when./ Behold, God made me funky. There ain’t nothin’ I can’t do.” Indeed. She and Tracie Morris are cutting us a new rug.

Tom Mandel – To the Cognoscenti (Atelos, 2007)
A remarkable book in three parts: a long poem sequence “To the Cognoscenti,” a selection of “First Poems,” and “Cheshbon ha-nefesh,” a series of poems that are part of an assigned inventory of the poet’s soul. Mandel is an oddity – perhaps an acquired taste, like a complex red wine. A key figure in the early days of Language poetry (when Mandel lived in the Bay Area), he has since charted a thoroughly independent course as a successful businessman (as a consultant, marketing executive, and entrepreneur). Mandel has considerable intellectual resources (having studied many years ago at the University of Chicago with Hannah Arendt and Saul Bellow), and as a poet he is not trying to please anyone (but himself and what he perceives to be the just demands of poetry), and he is not hustling the Po Biz circuits. Instead, he is producing a measured, serious, deeply thoughtful poetry – perhaps not something that will appeal to younger readers. I find his thinking and his questioning, his candor and his forthright consideration of what is essential to be inspiring and deeply engaging: “You know I wonder sometimes can I/ love this life that turns my soul/ around and around, screwing it/ straight down into the earth/ if this not poetry – then what?/ if it becomes poetry again – then what?”

Glenn Mott – Analects (Chax Press, 2007)
Analects is a remarkable first book by a wonderfully independent, smart poet, Glenn Mott. The book emerges from Mott’s time in China during the boom of the early and mid-1990s: “In the years I was there the economy of Shanghai grew 19%.” It is, quite clearly, not a typically American book of poetry, i.e., it is not predominantly about me and my feelings. It is a book deeply involved with asking how one does find a place in the world – that respects and observes and analyzes the workings of that world. As a book of poems, Analects puts the form of the poem itself into question, seeking to learn from sources as diverse as Thoreau, Pound, and Confucius. Mott’s ambition is to know, see, and appreciate the world around him with clarity: “There must be a word for/ whelmed –/ to appreciate something the exact amount.” As such, this is a book that George Oppen, perhaps the greatest poet of clarity, would have admired.

Stephen Vincent – Walking Theory (Junction Press, 2007)
What better measure for poetry, what better metric, what better rhythm and attention to time and place, what more reliable foot possible than poems built upon walks. Routes of the familiar re-viewed and re-incarnated. Place become word. A life lived walking in San Francisco, a poetry compassionate and independent, the scene as seen: “STEAL BACK YOUR LIFE / stenciled in big black letters on the sidewalk.” At times elegiac – for the dead in Iraq, for the poet’s father, for friends – at times celebratory through a kind of slowly emerging ecstasy even in the face of a painfully demanding city: “the heart/ let loose among buildings without trees,/ the lobbies of the dead, people who lean/ variously to struggle with reason against/ an architecture born deadly.” So “what can the poem do, walking, step-by-step: witness, suffer, hope.”