Blue Guide

From Sfakian Variations - Goats bawl and goats' bells clink and ice in the glass of ouzo tinkles back and that is all the music - even tzitzikes rest and listen - anyone needs to face tonight, until the fog settles in, thick and muggy, though cold and clammy on the painted railing around the balcony that overlooks this whole small world one nearly overlooked and now can't bear to leave where the taverna lights grow dimmer by the minute now and then are hard to make out as a dwelt-on memory and then and now are gone. Inspired by the miraculously mercurial potential of words, Stephen Yenser takes readers on a heady trip through a world full of promise yet compromised by human weakness. Set in sunny southern California and Greece, the poems of "Blue Guide" cast the shadow of mortality, and the tones are elegiac. This combination of the deadly serious and the exuberant is natural, Yenser notes; after all, work and orgy share the same etymological root, as do travail and travel, pledge and play. Using various poetic modes, Yenser offers, here, a quatrain written to name a painting by Dorothea Tanning; a sequence of poems for his daughter; an excursive poem at once about Los Angeles and Baghdad and his father and a petty criminal; a group of prose poems set in penumbral bars; some postcards to a dead friend; and a meditation prompted by a sojourn on a remote Aegean island. The most unexpected work is an assemblage of quotations and glosses in the tradition of the commonplace book, except that in Yenser's hands these entries are densely interrelated.

Stephen Yenser is professor of English and director of creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. His first book of poems, The Fire in All Things, won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.