Objects Are Closer Than They Appear
A poet's examination of his subjects is so intimate that it both reveals and distorts.
DARK WILD REALM
By Michael Collier
  Book World: Poetry Poet's Choice: Excerpts to honor past Poet's Choice hosts.
Objects Are Closer Than They Appear: Michael Collier's intimate examinations
American Idyll: Elegiac poet Donald Hall knows baseball, death.
My Bondage, My Freedom: Natasha Trethewey plumbs public, personal histories.
He Saw the Best Minds of His Generation: Jason Shinder on poet Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"
Notes From Underground: Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney returns to memory and work.
When Doves Cry: Political and personal poetry for the wider world
Confessional: "Black-belt sinner" Mary Karr tells of her conversion to Catholicism in verse.
Alone Together: Stephen Burt takes on the fragmented, soitary nature of American life.
Michael Dirda: "The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy" offers a fresh take on the celebrated Greek poet.
Poetry on Audio: "Voices of the Past" opens an ear to history's greatest poets. Audio samples are included.
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Houghton Mifflin. 63 pp. $22
Michael Collier writes elegant, accessible, closely observed poems. It's a pleasure to encounter the words he so precisely selects. One must ask, then, where the darkness and wildness reside in Dark Wild Realm 's poems of awakening to birds singing or of kissing one's love on the lips. Surely a writer who chooses words with such care intends his title to represent the book?
The cover image gives one hint: Tony Hamblin's photograph shows bird feathers at such close range that they look like the sea at night or a set of dark stairs coated with ice. At times Collier steps so near to his subject that the thing seen is both revealed and distorted, and a threat emerges from beneath the magnified surfaces. "Mine Own John Clare," a poem about a delusional man, closes with these lines:
And sometimes -- look at me! -- he'd put his face so close to mine
I no longer saw him but the parts that he contained: pores
and blemishes, the cheek's sharp contours, and his eyes,
dark, filmy patches, watery with years of homelessness ahead
but alive, fierce, and, as I pulled away, unforgiving.
Another wild presence is the birds that land, nest, arise, devour, fall and sing throughout this book. Collier's birds are both fragile -- "less than an ounce,/and are so little of water,/more hollow than bone" -- and ominous: In "A Winter Feeding,"
something unseen