Kansas poet laureate’s collection puts contemporary American life into verse

April marks the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month. Here are two noteworthy poetry collections.

“Odd Evening: Poems” by Eric McHenry (80 pages; Waywiser Press; $19)

Eric McHenry, poet laureate of Kansas, celebrates poetry month with a new collection of verse. His poems follow traditional British rhyme and song-like patterns. This accessible book will delight any reader.

The mix of ballad-like forms with contemporary American life creates a dramatic contrast. “Street View,” the term for close-up satellite maps, is also the title of a poem. In rhymes and mostly iambic pentameter, McHenry describes a virtual game of tag. A son pursues a father who meanders “like a tiger swallowtail.” Is this an icon or a real butterfly?

The narrator continues the symbolic chase: “double-click down to 16th Avenue / and take the floating arrows.” In this alternate reality, time stops. The child never ages, “He can’t keep up with me for long — he’s still / a six-year-old, and running up a hill.” The boy wears the same jacket from that frozen moment. Rhymes suggest ticks on an analog clock, movement that continues, unlike the unmoving map.

McHenry’s poem “Apparent” is another stunner. The poet sets his metronome to three stresses per line, and again, a son sights his father, but reflected. The optical trickery creates an illusion of the father in “sun-puzzled glass.” This stops the child momentarily, but the older man remains behind the window pane, “in my frame.” The structure of the poem locks him in place.

Father and son appear in several of the poems, as each other’s shadows. Many other characters populate the poems, like Gil Carpenter, a minor league baseballer; childhood friends; and strangers overheard on the street. These characters set up dialogues in the poems and add depth.

Popular culture is never far away, as in “The Last Payphone in Topeka.” The poems range widely, and they also use dry twists of humor. McHenry, a professor at Washburn University in Topeka, examines oddities of this mixed media world and finds much to amaze himself and his readers. Traditional forms of British poets never sounded better.

“The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All” by C.D. Wright (135 pages; Copper Canyon Press; $18)

Yes, the long title of this book is correct. There is nothing new under the sun, except among the best poets. That is their job, inventing new language. Wright immediately speaks to her readers with this extreme title, which summarizes themes of the book. “The Poet” is herself and other versifiers. “The Lion” is Robert Creeley, her friend and a mercurial poet who had ties to most of the major North American trends of last century.

For poetry month, this book is perfect. It both introduces and explains poetry. It illustrates Wright’s innovative genius by using catalog descriptions, a form that goes back to Homer’s listing of ships that set sail for Troy.

She attempts a definition of poetry, “Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal Than the World’s Largest Retailer.” In this 10-page piece, the poet describes, harangues, repeats refrains, and expounds on the importance of verse: “Its castings make some growth possible even on contaminated ground.” This is one of many insights about the importance of this ancient art in a commercialized culture. It suggests hope as environmental depletion progresses. She asserts how the process of language is adaptive: “Poetry it turns out, not capital, is what is fluid.”

Wright presents the essence of American “exceptionalism,” the many-voiced chaos of First Amendment rights. She uses poetic forms in her short pieces that hover between verse and prose. She writes about politics without abandoning the lyric.

The book was published within months of Wright’s unexpected death. She died at the beginning of this year, and the community of poetry lovers mourns her loss. She was a poet of conscience. “One With Others,” about the 1960s civil rights movement in Arkansas, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2011. In this new book, she bequeaths an extraordinary set of compositions to all wordsmiths.

This story was originally published April 2, 2016 at 4:53 AM with the headline "Kansas poet laureate’s collection puts contemporary American life into verse."