Listener

Poetry. LISTENER bristles with disquiet, its lines a disquisition on the existential situation of the person who listens so hard to himself, 'I found everything / Felt like my head.' Emerging from 'The empty moment before my face surfaces / Before I find I've started the whole thing again, ' these poems never escape knowing 'Here I am...I'm no place new, ' but they go on to make of thought such an affable trap that we enjoy the sound of it snapping shut on us, too. Each poem makes play out of self's inevitable self-consciousness-'how I saw myself as my own / Toy'-and plumbs the remarkable capacities of poetic language for representation and plasticity, fact and fancy, imagistic precision and prosodic invention. The resulting music brings readers paradoxically back to themselves, to those moments when 'I have a voice I can sometimes find / when my head's in a book, distracted and aware.'-Brian Teare