Every other month, someone is writing another essay about poetry’s slow and hysterical death. It is either a lack of imagination in contemporary poetry or the quiet ineptitudes of a moribund academic system (a closed one, at that) that are to blame. Almost always, they lament the sameness of contemporary poetry, its cold shoulders and angular post-modern juxtapositions. I suggest that these alarmists might not be looking hard enough for the new poetry—not hard enough, at least, to have found The Pajamaist, which, being a 2006 Lannan Literary Selection, ought to be easy enough to hunt down.

Innovation and surprise are the dual engines that operate The Pajamaist. These poems are full of movement, associative and geographical, which, rather than sounding restless, have the unifying principle of a relentlessly engaged onlooker. There is no anxiety that the speaker who shows us, alternately, the pyramids of eggplants and the translucent green lettering on a shop window, is doing so for no good reason. Which is to say that these poems search, as in “There is a Light,” to drift toward “the opposite and therefore holy direction.”

Of course, in the climate of contemporary poetics, surprise has become such a basic family value as to nearly disappear. Discursive poems are easy enough to find, but Zapruder’s syntactical innovation neatly sets him apart. An exemplary passage from “Cat Radio:”

All through february month of war

the eyes of the cat are pacing cats

cats hate money they shred it in millions

stalking the light from colored glass bottles

to bottle slow leaping light is winning

listen to old drama fill this room

carry on you women of athens!

don’t let anyone turn on your radios!

In describing the objects of this world, Zapruder constantly performs a miracle of transformative description. It is not radio static, it is “who cares I do static.” It is not emptiness, but “a giant like a skydome//full of nothing but laughter//emptiness.” Such a great degree of specificity could spin out of control, but in these poems it allows the reader to empathize more deeply with the speaker. Syntactically, these images are full of switchbacks and hairpin turns, but they do allow the reader to travel.

Poems like these can sound arbitrary—this is their greatest risk. No matter how technically skilled or surprising these poems are, the melancholy search for the opposite but holy direction is the real attraction here. Stylistic arabesques are meaningless without a destination, and the poems in this book often hit the mark, whether it is to console a friend’s grief or to get to the bottom, finally, of what makes Canada so innocent and annoying.

Many of these qualities are familiar from Zapruder’s first collection, American Linden, but they are expanded and refined in the longer poems in The Pajamaist. “Twenty Poems for Noelle” and “The Pajamaist,” two of the longest sequences, allow for more space, but also more twisting specificity. “Twenty Poems for Noelle,” is a series of twenty-line poems in which the name of the addressee, Noelle, moves from the first line to the second in sequential order. This chiastic structure gives the effect of moving through grief, or, as in the second poem:

Summer’s breathing, and these

Noelle are only for you.

I don’t care if you need them,

or if you’re happy right now, just

dream toward a little calm

something other than medicine

brings.

The titular poem “The Pajamaist” is an account of a novel the speaker writes in his dreams; it is about the discovery that suffering may be switched from one person to another by simply switching pajamas and taking a pill. The Pajamaist, the first person capable of taking on the suffering of others, is discovered by researchers who wish to refine his technique. This innovation brings “randomly allocated” suffering to an end, at least in the dream novel. Suffering itself becomes a quantifiable element, something to be tamed and reckoned with. A narrative written in the preferred prose poetry style, “The Pajamaist” becomes the center around which the book coalesces. The strong mimetic resonance of a dreamer’s novel about dreams throws its own light and shadow over the rest of the book.

Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a collection of lectures delivered at Yale in 1985 examines what Calvino suspects to be the most important virtues of literature in the twenty-first century. In his lecture on Exactitude, Calvino says,

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most

distinctive faculty—that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language,

revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to

level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to

dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that

shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.

As an antidote to this plague, Calvino recommends a radical kind of exactitude, one in which the tensions of the geometrical and the metaphysical can share a cosmological system. Or, in his words, a renewed effort to use language in a way that “enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.”

Or, to put it more bluntly: anxiety about the state of poetry, as it reflects the state of language, is a worthy one. The Pajamaist, however, is invigorating precisely because it resists emotional and figurative short-hand so entirely. It is worth reading for its well-calibrated images alone, but most memorable for its radical specificity.

Sarah E. Smith (TX)  studies poetry and fiction as a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Swink, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and Pebble Lake Review.