Poets’ Corner

The White Eyelash: Poems; Susan Kinsolving; Grove Press: 240 pp., $13 paper

Susan KINSOLVING’S first full-length book, “Dailies & Rushes,� was a sudden and dazzling success d’estime. My own review (for another newspaper) noted her “powerful and practiced repertory of formal gestures,� and other critics praised her work as “grand and almost terrifying.� After such tributes and an award or two, the expectation that Kinsolving would manage a repeat performance was shaky. Yet here is “The White Eyelash,� proving that a poet can carefully sustain solid inventive work from book to book, poem to poem.

“The White Eyelash� is a long book (perhaps a bit too long) and somewhat daunting in its formal styles and fashionable-sass voice -- armored syllabics and rhymes, some internal, some “ex�, endlessly chiming with Horatian rhythms and Martial-esque gags. There are carefully plotted sections with titles like “At the Exit� and “No Longer Here.� Comic relief is paramount in a collection which, on one hand, describes and elegizes the demise of the poet’s “demented mother� with black exactitude, then counter-balances the grief with some truly nutty near-doggerel:

He saw his lost libido

deep in her jalapeno.

If you experienced that as painful, then avoid some of her “Unfortunate Ice Creams,� including Calamari Crunch, Praline with Parakeet Feet and Marshmallow Milk of Magnesia.

These giddy “commercial breaks� provide relief from the tough-minded, powerful “nursing-home� sonnets -- and from the lyrics for a “Cantata� commissioned by Glimmerglass (lyrics that seem extraneous to this collection).

This feeling of crazy experimentation coexists with a firm formal control, which produces a slightly schizophrenic but grounded and lively perspective. The book is filled with energetic echoes of everyone from Frost -- “ ... how to be acquainted with / the night without disturbing its peace� -- to Shakespeare -- “ ... nest again, or (perchance) to dream� -- to a dark family secret, echoing in and out of a mother’s reluctant speech.

Here, syntax is all: Out of its altering patterns deep insight occurs again and again. Insouciant and ambitious, Kinsolving steers her dappled craft to safe harbor.

*

Torn Sky: Poems; Debra Nystrom; Sarabande: 88 pp., $12.95 paper

Debra Nystrom’s first book, “A Quarter Turn,� was a polite, accomplished volume: But it did not begin to prepare us for the raw, kinetic, Willa Cather-echoing landscape of “Torn Sky,� an ambitious, intimate portrait of dreamlike extremes -- prairie vastness versus the complex architecture of the personal.

The poems are set in a fierce, searingly unsentimental South Dakota, where miles of Scandinavian farmland unroll next to the mysterious, grieving reservation acres:

Along the riverbed cottonwoods

flashing silver under-leaves in the wind --

what could they be signaling?

if you made it here you had

one hundred sixty vacant acres

to prove up, then claim for good; nobody

watching, only prairie larks

afloat like dust in the bottomless sky.

There is an autobiographical turn to the poems here -- they track the author’s growing-up years -- yet they stream in and out of temporal “dams� or stopped moments: the freakishness of feeding cows in sub-zero weather, a surreal ladies’ room “scalping� of a cheerleader, the testimony of the dying at Wounded Knee filling the background.

The day-to-day backbreaking labor of farming, a small town’s uneasy relationship to the neighboring Lakota Rosebud Reservation, then the subject’s inexorable movement into adult life, city life, the birth of a child. These experiences flow together under the great torn sky (an image from the journals of Lewis and Clark) of the title. Nystrom’s tone never falters; it is deeply felt but never nostalgic. It is permeated with a dark soaring wonder that makes this book uncommon: sky-haunted, unexpected and utterly unforgettable.