Djelloul Marbrook

(Meditations on Rising and Falling, Philip Pardi, The University of Wisconsin Press, 87 pp, 2008, $14.95)

A good book of poems is not just a collection of good poems. Conceptualizing a book of poems is like conceptualizing a complex poem times ten. There are ways to play it safe: safe poems, safe structure. You employ what you know about prevailing tastes and show your competence. Nothing wrong with that.

But it’s not what Pardi (inset) has done. In this Brittingham Prize book he has pursued a vision with great intellectual courage and prosodic virtuosity. He has reached far and high. The difference between a poem that is merely pyrotechnic and a successful poem is the poet’s respect for the original sensibility of the poem. You can force an idea into a brilliant framework for effect or you can, as Pardi unfailingly does, work out the relationship between the demeanor of an idea and the metrics that most respectfully animate it.

In the poem The Roofers he tells of a man who is about to fall. He’s probably the hardworking immigrant we pass every day on the way to work. What we will not have noticed, what Pardi does notice, is that moments before the fall that we know is coming the man painstakingly frees a fly from tar paper, calling the insect amigo.

The poem is an alchemy of narrative craft, joinery, precognition and ordinary detail. The fly and the roofer become metaphors for heartbreak. We’re thunderstruck that this gentleman should have fallen to his death after an act of such exquisite compassion.

Pardi’s poems are remarkable for their technical restlessness, delicacy and precision. Among poets, he is a diamond cutter.

In Sonata, a poem appropriately in four movements, he employs different metrics and versifications for each movement. One might think the poem would suffer from being too obviously a tour de force, but it doesn’t. The reason it doesn’t is that Pardi isn’t trying to knock you out. He doesn’t care about the wow factor because he knows it’s cheap. He sings to himself, knowing that if a thing makes sense to him because he has put it well, then it may make sense to us. Poetry is as much gratitude as it is song.—DM