What Kind (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Contemporary American Poetry Collection for Literature Lovers & Book Clubs

Martha Zweig's abrupt, startling poems have the quality of fairy tales no one has yet read, but which we somehow remember when we first encounter them. In a poem like "Rumpelstiltskin Recounts His Formative Years" we learn of the youth of a character who traditionally has no past and no future. In most of the poems this sense of fable is not so literal, but the sense of essential, though often broken, story and scene is strong and consistent, even relentless: the poems sleep "in the very wolf's yellow breath." One of Zweig's poems is entitled "Primordial," and there is indeed a primordial, elemental quality to her poems. They engage in digging down through the roots and loam (these poems are deeply rooted in natural landscapes that are at once spare and luxuriant), in a stripping down to the newels and posts of "the wooden narratives": "hurl it, haul it all & set it/high to dry some other time." These poems are dense and intense, giving us the pith of event and occasion, the full feel of things with no extraneous matter. Both rough-hewn wood and glittering gemstone (hard and resistant in either case), Zweig's poetry fascinates in its gnarled, wayward syntax (as she writes in "Ducks," "I do love a snag!"), its simultaneously halting and propulsive rhythms, its punning and wordplay and absorption in sound: "Here's how the damp black wood out back there/drudges to this day." To paraphrase a few of Zweig's poems, she flavors her chaos with sweet reason and rough approximate love, doing and undoing somewhats and whatnots, adding her own lyrics to accompany the rain: "I knew him then &/there and now: those syllables."