26 S UNDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2021
HOWDIE-SKELP
By Paul Muldoon
179 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
$27.
“Howdie-skelp”: the
slap a midwife gives
a newborn. Poem-
sequences dominate
Muldoon’s storm of
slaps against piety,
prudery, cruelty and
greed. “American Standard,”
named after a toilet brand, riffs
for pages on lines from T.S.
Eliot’s “The Waste Land” while
churning through contemporary
concerns like gerrymandering,
immigration, and grotesque
politicians and their media plat-
forms. Like Eliot, Muldoon’s after
big, apocalyptic vision; unlike
Eliot, Muldoon is willing — no,
compelled — to clown.
In one long sequence Muldoon
dives into the human ook that
underlies great paintings. His
bawdiness is political. Muldoon’s
version of Leonardo’s “Last
Supper” pictures the tablecloth
as Mary Magdalene’s bedsheet,
the crease in it “A gutter filled
with candle grease./ The semen
stain where Judas spilled his
salt.” Like many important poets
before him, from John Milton to
Tim Rice, Muldoon knows that
sinners and villains are more
interesting, maybe more human,
than self-appointed good guys.
Poems, for Muldoon, are occa-
sions to plumb the language for a
truth that’s abysmal: as in ap-
palling, and as in deep. It’s clear
that underneath the play Mul-
doon is furious, maybe even
terrified, about the state of
things.
PLAYLIST FOR THE APOCALYPSE
Poems
By Rita Dove
114 pp. Norton. $26.95.Plenty of poems
here address dis-
ability, history and
quotidian human
behavior, but racism
and economic op-
pression are the former poet
laureate’s primary concerns in
this book, her first in 12 years. In
“Aubade West,” set in Ferguson,
Mo., the speaker might be Mi-
chael Brown or anyone subject to
poverty and racism in a small
town. “A day just like all the
others,/ me out here on the
streets/ skittery as a bug cross-
ing a skillet.” In less fraught
poems, Dove’s affable voice
occupies a tonal middle distance.
“I love the hour before take-
off,/ that stretch of no time, no
home,” she writes in “Vacation,”
observing a “bachelorette try-
ing/ to ignore a baby’s wail,” and
an athlete waiting to board “like
a seal trained for the plunge.”
The poem doesn’t lift off, and
doesn’t want to — after all, the
passengers are still at the gate.
But “Bellringer,” the book’s first
poem, certainly does. Here Dove
assumes the voice of Henry
Martin, born to slavery at Monti-
cello the day Thomas Jefferson
died, who worked as a bellringer
at the University of Virginia.
Voiced by Dove, Martin imagines
that, hearing his bells ring,
“down in that/shining, blistered
republic,/someone will pause to
whisper/Henry!—and for a
moment/ my name flies free.” A
fitting way to start a book trying
to understand saving graces and
the things they save us from.PROGNOSIS
Poems
By Jim Moore
102 pp. Graywolf. Paper, $16.“I am still so very
thirsty,” ends one
poem in “Prognosis.”
Moore is preoccu-
pied with old age,
loneliness, mortality,
and also with the
American body politic’s own
failure. These are poems of ar-
resting lyric reportage; whimsi-
cal, tragic, a touch fantastical.
Watching from a window in “The
Pandemic Halo” the poet notices
a glow appearing around “the
nurse who wears a pink cape and
parks/ in the lot across from me,
almost always empty now.”
Sometimes Moore meditates
on human destruction (“I know
about the disappearance/ of the
river dolphins, the sea turtles
with tumors./ I know about the
way the dead/don’t return no
matter how long they take to
die/ in the back of a police car”)
in ways that risk allowing a
reader to nod in agreement and
turn aside. By contrast, flush-
right poems that begin each
section are jaggedly, hurriedly
urgent. “AND/I/ realize my
mistake only now:/ all I needed
to do/ that day twenty years
ago/ was be with my
friend/ who called out,/ ‘But I
don’t want to die.’/ To stand even
closer by his side.” Instead of
simply watching, these lines get
at what’s broken, and attempt
repair.THE GIRL SINGER
Poems
By Marianne Worthington
90 pp. Fireside. Cloth, $29.95;
paper, $19.95.As the title suggests,
musical perform-
ance supplies narra-
tive material in
Worthington’s de-
but; so does Worth-
ington’s female-
specific, Appalachian experience.
The political sphere is present in
flickers, in, say, a grandfather’s
xenophobic World War II racism
or (in the title poem) violence
against women, where the “girl
singer” mourns “the women
killed in all the murder/ ballads
I knew.”
Shorter lyrics animated by
metaphor startle. Spying a nest
in a hospital “breezeway,” Worth-
ington describes displaced barn
swallows in a flurry of figuration
as “little fighter-pilot parents”
whose babies in “a chalice of gob
and mud,/ atop the sprinkler-
head cups” are “tiny ostomies of
endless hungers.” “Ostomies”
slides the poem from metaphor
into narrative — we’re now in the
land of medical procedure and
digestive damage. Worthington
concludes: “What are the ques-
tions/ I should be asking here as
droppings/ mound up on the
concrete steps/ around my feet
like splotched offerings?” Rheto-
rical questions can often be
edited out of poems, but this one
provides passage, in celebration
and disgust, to contemplating the
waste that unites all creatures.AGAINST SILENCE
By Frank Bidart
63 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.Bidart is exciting to
read and hard to
explain. Quoting his
sprawling, austere
poems doesn’t much
help. In “Against
Silence,” he seems
interested in individual and col-
lective ethics, and sees a threat in
silence — both the kind that op-
poses speech in life and the kind
found in death, which we’re all up
against. His poems float and
swerve, at once cinematic and
oddly intimate. He distrusts
sweeping statements of truth. He
titles one poem “The Arc of the
Moral Universe Bends Towards
Justice” (a quote from Martin
Luther King Jr. much shared on
social media), then moves di-
rectly into a puncturing first line:
“is an illusion.” Later in the same
poem, with its voluminous discur-
sions, Bidart writes of America’s
ugly history: “Civil War,—/...
followed by a century of Jim
Crow./ If you do not become a
master/ you are a slave.” Bidart
is concerned with injustice, but he
doesn’t display his feelings so
much as seek to understand the
internal and external landscapes
from which they arise. The poet
recalls a “rich farmer” father
whom the government “refused
to enlist,” and who “night after
night in bars/... fought soldiers
who had called him a coward.”
Bidart is dispassionate but never
detached; at his most thinky he
often seems most tender. His
poems recognize, and help us
recognize, the inherent harm in
what we hold dear, defend and
even worship.ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALL
DAISY FRIED’Sforthcoming book of adaptations from Baudelaire, “The Year the City Emptied,” will be published in March.
(^) The Shortlist/Poetry/By Daisy Fried