Michael Collier, Stanley Plumly, Jane Shore, Lucille Clifton: Great poets of D.C. area

Washington is obsessed with language. Whether lobbying, legislating or campaigning, this has always been a city of wordsmiths. At their best, our politicians have written phrases to inspire the world; at their worst, they’ve deliberately tortured phrases into nonsense. But the greater Washington area is also home to another group of people devoted to the careful parsing of language. Several of the nation’s finest poets live or have lived here. And the publication of four new collectionsgives us a chance to reflect on the remarkable literary resources of this region.

1The title of Michael Collier’s new book, An Individual History (Norton, $25.95), may lead some readers to expect an autobiography in verse. But this collection is more diverse, more fragmented, ranging not only between various levels of the personal and the social, but also between various degrees of the real and the imagined. “History,” the longest piece in the book, is a travel memoir and a troubling meditation on political evil and anti-Semitism. Collier, who teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland, remains intriguingly coy and evasive as he speculates about the destiny of various passenger liners he might or might not have been a passenger on: “Who knows the fate of the U.S.S.R. Felix Dzerzhinsky, / perhaps it’s a casino aground on the Aral Sea, / or like his socialist-realism sculpture, toppled by a crane.” These speculations give way to questions about the author:

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(BOA) - “The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010” by Lucille Clifton.

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The ship I sailed, the U.S.S.R. Baikal, was a lake,

and how a lake could be a ship, I don’t understand,

and I don’t understand Michael Collier, then or now,

who loves the idea that truth is great.

Collier weaves himself in and out of his poems like a boxer and can go from caressing to slapping a reader with almost no warning. The book’s first poem, “Piety,” is a personal recollection of being an altar boy that suddenly turns brutally suggestive: “Any of us who served Mass / knew the inside of his mouth — ” he writes of the church organist, whose lower lip was “moist with holy / adhesive and reptilian in its reach.” But Collier can also write lovely lyrics, moving family reminiscences and even funny poems about dogs.

2Stanley Plumly, Maryland’s poet laureate and the director of the University of Maryland’s creative writing department, combines stateliness, formal beauty and emotional urgency in rich and musical tapestries of language. Like Collier, he mixes history with personal experience in surprising and resonant ways. “Glenn Gould,” one of my favorite poems in Orphan Hours (Norton, $25.95), reenacts a single day in 1960 when Plumly heard the famous pianist perform. The poem takes in not only Gould’s visit to Cincinnati but John F. Kennedy’s as well, then projects ahead to Gould’s retirement and ends with a description of the era expressed, as so often is the case in Plumly’s writing, through nature imagery:

This was the fall, October, when Ohio,

like almost every other part of the country,

is beginning to be mortally beautiful,