Puzo’s epic tale not only made truckloads of money but it also — particularly the film adaptation — garnered critical plaudits; it is routinely listed among the all-time top 10 American movies. An ur-American narrative whose appeal crossed all boundaries, Puzo’s saga of a Mafia family’s inter-generational struggle is probably, pace Huck Finn, the most familiar story in American culture, and Don Vito Corleone surely keeps company with Huck and Jay Gatsby as one of the most indelible icons of American fiction. The first real “blockbuster” book, Puzo’s lurid peek at everyday life in gangland eventually sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and, many argue, changed the dynamics of the publishing business.

That change, with its emphasis on glitzy big-ticket books (Jackie Collins claims Puzo as one of her literary mentors), was not quite the splash Puzo had hoped to make as an author. Although he often admitted he’d written “The Godfather” only for the money, his first two novels — “The Dark Arena” and “The Fortunate Pilgrim” — were earnest literary efforts and, as such, hadn’t earned him much of a living. After he became a fixture on bestseller lists, he would recall those earlier outings with the kind of nostalgia that suggested he’d crossed over from a literary realm and could never return.

Along with other postwar, second-generation immigrants like Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, Puzo began his writing career with complex aspirations — to tell an autobiographical tale that explored the difficulties and allure of cultural assimilation in America. Born in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, the child of Neopolitan Italians, Puzo drew on his hardscrabble upbringing — his father deserted him and his six siblings when he was 12 — for his second novel, “The Fortunate Pilgrim.” His fictionalized version of his mother, Lucia Santa, is a stern and canny matriarch who negotiates her bicultural world with peasant wisdom and a streetwise eye. In the preface to a recent edition of the novel, Puzo claimed that his mother was the inspiration for Don Corleone. “Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother,” he said.

Even though the critics appreciated these early books, Puzo found himself broke and blocked as a writer at the age of 45. Figuring he could raise some cash writing a book that collected the many stories he’d heard about organized crime, he dashed off “The Godfather.” “I wished like hell I’d written it better,” he would later say. “I wrote below my gifts in that book.” But the desire to make a quick buck on Mafia sensationalism turned out to be a true devil’s bargain. Read all over the world, the book is regarded as his single achievement, and his regret — how many times must he have rewritten in his mind what he had believed were disposable sentences — must have been keen.

No doubt the millions of dollars he earned soothed his conscience somewhat, but Puzo’s sense of having betrayed his abilities continued to be played out in his writing career. He became a compulsive gambler, blowing much of what he made in Vegas. This set up a cycle that required him to write another commercial blockbuster — more crime, more garish sex — just to keep pace with his losses at the craps tables. The post-”Godfather” novels — “Fools Die,” “The Sicilian,” “The Fourth K” and “The Last Don” — rehash, with wildly varying degrees of skill, the bloody operatics that made him famous. In “The Sicilian” he does it with a deliciously exacting eye for the island’s landscape and history; in “The Last Don,” he’s on automatic pilot, spooling out television-style clichis.

Still, by relying on the gangster story, surely the most worn-out plot in 20th century American books and movies, Puzo did manage to write the master narrative for the genre. The “Godfather” saga — the novel and the first two films (sorry, I just refuse to concede the existence of “Godfather III”) — is the benchmark telling of the American myth of ruthless acquisition. Don Corleone is a fantasy figure for have-nots (not for nothing did Snoop Dogg title one of his albums “The Doggfather”) as well as haves. The Don’s deep sense of serrated grievance makes him an American everyman: “[Don Corleone] had long ago learned that society imposes insults that must be borne, comforted by the knowledge that in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge upon the most powerful.”

In Corleone’s dictatorial yet strangely soothing exercise of absolute power, we find the benevolent monarch who will make the trains run on time, protect us and, best of all, set straight our enemies. Guys in corner offices and guys on corners both trill with delight at the Mafia boss’s ever cagey regard for the world around him. His steely paranoia — “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer” — makes him the quintessential American realist hero. But Corleone is also a gushy sentimentalist, a papa who weeps for his boys (when he’s not giving them a good smack). In this way, the Don serves as the ultimate patriarch, the strong, loving father you wished you had. Perhaps this explains his story’s global appeal. That, and the cool way people get blown away.

In “The Godfather,” Puzo also rather handily accomplished his goal of depicting the immigrant’s struggle in the New World. Italian-Americans may have chafed at his having capitalized on the unpleasant reality of the Mafia in a way that doubtlessly perpetuated ugly stereotypes — “That’s Mafia style, isn’t it? All olive oil and sweet talk,” says one character — but in a strange way they also embraced the tale. (For years “The Godfather” theme song was a staple at many Italian-American weddings.) The book and film had, at least, made their community visible. And, certainly, the role of the Corleone family as outsiders in a white-bread, straight world sounded a larger theme for many immigrants. In between the guns and the cannoli, Puzo had, in fact, made his story of ethnic isolation and striving accessible to millions of readers.

Even when writing with the meter running, Puzo could unreel the kind of phrasing that slips permanently into the language. If you know only the film adaptations of “The Godfather,” you might be surprised to discover that the novel is nearly word-for-word the same story (except for a weird digression about Sonny’s girlfriend’s gynecological problems). The novel’s talky dialogue was pared down to epigrammatic utterance by Puzo for the movie — “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” — thus the movie feels more Shakespearean and less like the gritty realist genre effort it was meant to be. The novel’s wise guys don’t appear on the scene like archetypal forces of nature as do their cinematic counterparts. Instead, they act like refugees from a Hemingway novel — ambivalent about the codes by which they’ve chosen to live. (Indeed, Puzo’s first novel, “The Dark Arena,” was set in post-World War II Europe and can be characterized as a sharply done, more sexually knowing update of “The Sun Also Rises.”) Aside from codifying an American myth and gracing it with memorable phraseology — “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse” — Puzo’s most notable achievement in “The Godfather” may be bringing up the volume on crime’s social dimension, the chitchat of murderous men, and making possible logomaniacal progeny such as “Pulp Fiction.”

Puzo’s last unpublished novel was titled “Omerta” (the Cosa Nostra code of silence). As poet laureate of the Mafia, he was unable to escape telling its highly marketable tales; judging by the endless stream of top-grossing Mafia books and movies, you’d guess that Mafia entertainment far out-grosses the actual criminal enterprise. The siren call of this big money may have led him astray from high-minded art, but it assured him a place of honor in the carnival tent of pop culture. In his famous novel he wrote, “Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that’s why they have godfathers.” Indeed, Puzo’s iconic creation, Don Corleone, had two fathers — the pulp writer and the serious novelist. Together they made us all a storytelling offer we couldn’t refuse.

As a kid born in the mid-’50s, I was raised during a transitional period of child-rearing philosophy. The folk notion of “Spare the rod, spoil the child” was giving way, at least among the educated classes, to less punitive methods of discipline. Instead of spanking, experts like Dr. Spock advised parents to treat kids as relative equals and refrain from possibly trauma-inducing violence. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s this approach was supported by numerous studies that suggested strong links between spanking and juvenile delinquency, low IQ, depression and low earning potential. For boomers coming into parenthood during these years it seemed as if every swat on baby’s behind would drive their tyke deeper into social and economic disaster. And besides, like smoking and driving American-made cars, spanking was something done by the great unwashed. As a result, in upscale households, spankers joined the Tontons Macoutes, SAVAK and the Khmer Rouge as naughty, unenlightened brutes. A recent U.S. News and World Report article cites a survey done last year in which “41 percent of college-educated Americans disapproved of spanking, compared with only 20 percent of those who didn’t complete high school.”

The effect of social class in forming opinions about corporal punishment shows, sometimes contentiously, in my own house. My wife, Jane, is the daughter of two college professors. She was raised in an academic community where alternative schools and therapists’ offices were pivotal institutions in family life. Many of her parents’ friends were not only psychologists, but child psychologists, like Selma H. Fraiberg, author of the landmark book “The Magic Years.” While Jane was growing up in the ’60s, the prevailing ethos in the diploma-saturated milieu of Ann Arbor, Mich., was markedly progressive — children were to be related to, understood. Punishment of any sort, especially physical correction, not only was believed to be ineffective but, in fact, pernicious: Spanked kids became aggressive kids. In addition, spanking carried a bad political taint — at a time when the dad who threw away your pot stash was a fascist, the one who fanned his kids’ backsides was … a Republican. Any coercion was disdained as a remedy for disobedience. Indeed, obedience itself was an outmoded concept. The child raised in an enlightened home compromised or cooperated, not obeyed. For Jane, this notion — treating children as reasonable creatures whose autonomy is to be prized — forms the bedrock of her parenting philosophy.

I share this assumption with her, to a point. Yet my own upbringing asserts an atavistic pull away from such a noble belief. Without indulging too heavily in we-wuz-so-poor one-upmanship, it’s accurate for me to say my parents and my neighborhood were working class. Most dads worked at local oil refineries and steel mills. Neither of my parents finished high school — a fact that would not make them untypical in the neighborhood. In short, no one was reading “Summerhill”; no one was in therapy. Most parents parented reflexively — the way they had been raised, without the mediation of even popular experts like Spock. They were almost completely unaffected by the ideological changes in parenting techniques that were registering elsewhere. What they knew of these new approaches they dismissed as soft-headedness, the kind of namby-pamby parenting that produced those stringy-haired protesters on TV. So they spanked toddlers — you’d see a mom dusting the diaper-clad bum of her daughter as she shooed her away from a spilled glass on the porch — and wailed upon older kids, mostly boys, with straps. More than once I saw someone’s royally pissed old man arrive at a ballfield or corner hangout and begin peeling his belt off as his son dashed in advance of his wrath.

And my folks were no different. At least a few times a year before I reached 11 some screw-up on my part would net me either a wild (and especially frightful) thrashing from my mom or a measured set of 10 strokes from my dad. I was, as they say, no angel — at my Catholic school I routinely got Ds in “Self Control” and “Obedience” from nuns who smacked me, pulled my hair and pulled my pants taut while they whipped (and I use that word with no exaggeration) my backside with a wooden pointer. The general picture, as I have reflected on it since, seems strange, if not perverse. Homes and schools were guided by the decidedly pessimistic belief that kids were to be trained — like pets, or unruly cowlicks — and pain, it was thought, made the message stick.

Of course, my wife is openly appalled by this history of mine; she rightly sees in my angry flare-ups at our 4-year-old son the legacy of this rock-’em, sock-’em childhood. To her, the very idea of spanking a child, let alone pulling his hair or hitting him with a belt, must seem like a vestige of some lost, primitive world. But for me, that world was mine, or at least that of my parents. Thus, our household debate about spanking — I maintain that an occasional whack on the wrist or behind is hardly cause for concern, while she believes it does real damage — is framed by our allegiances to our families and backgrounds.

Once while we were out in the car, I had to stop for a toddler who had wandered into the middle of the road. I beeped my horn to alert the adults on the deck of a nearby house. The father came running down to retrieve the little boy, who had already waddled back to the grass. When he reached the child he gave him a resounding smack on the backside as he yelled something about never going near the road again. Jane thought the discipline completely unjustified; the inattentive parent, she said, was at fault. I agreed about the parent but felt the swat was an effective exclamation point to the father’s warning; the important thing was that the kid associated asphalt with ass hurt. This was before we had a child, and Jane’s faith in communication and belief in parent-child equality gave me pause (as, I’m sure, she reflected uncomfortably on my approval of spanking). It seemed to me that her view condemned my entire upbringing; I couldn’t help but think she was being naive. We have since both had our attitudes tested: Jane has given our son a rap or two and learned that he can survive the blow as well as she can weather the guilt. I have done likewise (more frequently), only to have my kid swing back, as if in dutiful confirmation of all those violence-begets-violence studies.

Yet, after four years of raising a pretty typical kid, I still see her readiness to consign any discipline problem to therapeutic solutions as the product of her rarefied background; she still, no doubt, sees my tilt toward physicality — just pick the boy up and stick him in bed — as a consequence of loving yet uninformed parenting. But the propensity for spanking among the uninformed has recently gotten some boost from the academy. While the general drift of experts’ advice continues to frown upon, if not decry, spanking, some changes are afoot. After a 1996 American Academy of Pediatrics conference on spanking, the conference organizers, S. Kenneth Schonberg and Stanford B. Friedman, wrote in the journal Pediatrics: “We must confess that we had a preconceived notion that corporal punishment, including spanking, was innately ‘bad.’” But the conference had convinced these researchers that “given a relatively ‘healthy’ family life in a supportive environment, spanking in and of itself is not detrimental to a child or predictive of later problems.”

Other studies, including a much-publicized one done recently by Marjorie Linder Gunnoe, a developmental psychologist at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., are questioning the connection between spanking and aggressive behavior by kids. She too asserts the need for a “warm, generally harmonious relationship with a parent.” I find these studies heartening — not only because they buttress my side in our ongoing household debate — but because they offer redemptive evidence for my own kidhood. It’s true I was hit; hell, at times I was beaten. That’s what old-school folks like my parents tended to do. But, and I know for some people this might seem a self-deluded stretch, the punishment was dealt out in a “warm, generally harmonious” home. Certainly more harmonious — on issues of child rearing — than the one I share now.

Of course, the sanguine ease with which mom and dad once sent us packing off to fascist gym teachers and senile nuns has long since flown out the window. For meritocractic boomers, there is no worry too small, no sacrifice too great when it comes to picking a school for our offspring. And the first big choice is — public or private?

For some it’s easy: those with access to plushly funded, nationally ranked public schools or others who, for religious reasons, require a private institution. Everyone else must sort through the murky mix of pluses and minuses that may pit money against safety or political ideals against parental aspirations. Making this difficult job even tougher is a low-level dread percolating just underneath this apparently rational process. After growing up in an epoch of economic security that withered in the ’70s and ’80s into a sustained period of uncertainty, boomer parents are justifiably anxious for their kids’ future.

Unfortunately this fear has taken on the serrated edge of panic, which gives the choice a lady-or-the-tiger quality — people believe that the right choice about kindergarten sets their little darling on the way to Yale while the wrong one sends them hurtling to Palookaville. This kind of pressure, compounded by mom and dad’s own competitive itch, can burden the decision with emotional freight more appropriate to, say, deciding whether a sick child should have surgery or chemo.

But it’s not as if the public vs. private conundrum isn’t truly a tough knot to untie. This is one of those dilemmas that brings our politics smack up against our instincts. Remember when those great advocates of public education, Bill and It-Takes-a-Village Hillary, first came to Washington and had to pick between the city’s public and private schools? After much back-pedaling about not sacrificing their child on the altar of political ideals, they opted for the fenced-in lawns of Sidwell Friends, a private school located in largely white Northwest Washington. Of course, the Clintons joined populous company (including that city’s “shadow senator,” Jesse Jackson, whose son, Jesse Jr., attended the same elite prep school as Al Gore): Most of Washington’s public servants, of whatever political stripe, steer clear of public schools. Apparently, government institutions may be a good place to draw a check, but you wouldn’t want to send your kids to one.

Most parents decline to climb on too high a horse about such hypocrisy. Surely not the fellow liberals I know in New York, who might condemn private schools set up in the South in response to court-ordered integration, yet still scramble to enroll their own children at top-drawer, mostly white private schools. Their justifications may invoke the high student-teacher ratios and metal detectors in public schools but, at bottom, how different is their choice? When it comes to our kids, we naturally want the best — or what’s perceived to be the best. Egalitarianism is a noble notion when expressed in the voting booth or in one’s choice of social life, but few of us could happily send junior off to run-of-the-mill teachers and average students at a so-so school. Thus the public-private choice forces hard looks at pet beliefs, and results are out in plain sight. Once your youngster’s enrolled at Brightchild Prep, you may wish to temper your dinner table spiel about how school vouchers are a right-wing plot to demolish the commonweal.

But Brightchild Prep doesn’t want just the bright child; it insists upon fairly loaded parents. Again, this public vs. private decision rubs our noses in reality. It is not untypical for private schools in big cities (where the public school system is often most stressed) to cost somewhere in excess of $12,000 per year. If you’re talking about two kids, kindergarten through high school, the total bill will run well over $300,000. After that you can begin to fork over for the prestige college at which they’ve presumably been aimed. This is not chump change; this is why you should have gone to law school instead of studying gender dysmorphia in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”

If, let’s say, the only public schools available to you are schools rife with problems — middling readings scores, asbestos alerts, don’t-give-a-shit teachers — and you are not particularly well heeled, you are a) going to move; b) Fed Ex your kids back and forth to a better funded school district; or c) send ‘em to PS 666 and feel hugely guilty about your miserable performance as both a parent and provider. Of course, the alternatives are rarely this stark, but the message is — suddenly you see just how your socioeconomic status is bequeathed to your children.

And if you don’t realize this, rest assured — other nervous, status-conscious parents will point it out to you. Wherever two or three parents gather in the name of kidhood, there is school talk. And more school talk. Aprhs breeding, the parentum boomerismus, whose only previous feeling about elementary education was impatience at not being able to pass a stopped school bus, becomes a pedagogic prognosticator with a deft command of test score data, cost per pupil allocations and teacher credentials.

And most of all, the species possesses a keen sense of school hierarchies — the good public schools with gifted programs, the private institutions with sagging reputations as feeder schools. The nature of such talk is to relentlessly drive up the ante over school choice: As soon as you’ve settled on a suitable public school some coffee-achiever will proffer the inside dope on why that school’s going to hell in a handbasket. They will then trumpet the public school you long ago decided wasn’t right, or they’ll sing the praises of the advanced math programs at Brightchild, where they’ve just been lucky enough to gain admittance for their precious Brunhilda. As they, by inference, call into question your judgment, parenting and income, you can reflect upon the precise moment at which a frozen smile becomes a grimace.

Putting the clench in that jaw is more than worry over your little Nell’s shot at the |ber-class, more than self-flagellation over financial inadequacy — it’s the powerfully disquieting memory of your own school days. How you fared in school — whether public, parochial or private — bears mightily on the choices you make for your kids. If you thrived in a private school, it’s not likely you will want to “step down” for your kids; likewise, if you felt lost and overlooked in a public school, you will want to “step up” to the personal attention private schools promise.

Yet there are others who are less than enthusiastic about the private option. One woman I know attended a posh private school in Cambridge, Mass., but, coming from a downscale background, she always felt outclassed by her wealthier classmates. The experience hasn’t lost its sting; she now fears that, as a scholarship student in a Manhattan private school, her daughter might also come to feel like the poor-relation at the party. Another friend doubts that the overheated competition in his elite school was really good for him. Even parents with the cash and social cachet required for private schools recall with unease the homogeneity of their own grade schools and worry about their tiny heirs being surrounded by too many kids borne of people like themselves: white, privileged and employed on Wall Street.

Parental heebie-jeebies aren’t entirely new, but things have changed since our parents’ time. The post-Reagan era distrust of all things governmental and the consequent drop in funding for public education unavoidably makes private schools appear more attractive. And, the nationwide increase in the number of private schools notwithstanding, stiff competition for admittance makes these institutions appear even more desirable.

Most parents in the ’50s and ’60s weren’t beset by so many options. For them, the choice of public schooling wasn’t founded in public spiritedness; it simply made sense. It was not unusual for the children of professionals, store employees and truck drivers all to attend the same public school — because it was a good school. (Regardless of whether a particular public school has actually declined, they have all been tarred with the bad big government brush.) These days there is no surer sign of deepening class divisions than the high-voltage anxiety coursing through boomer moms and dads. For the upper crust, private school is the way to keep your tykes right on track beside you. For the working poor, the choice is public school or … public school. And for folks in the middle — during our self-dramatizing moments — it can feel like straddling a widening earthquake fissure while holding your kids. You may or may not fall, but first thing, you’ve got to toss the kids to one side of the crevice, either hoi polloi or high society. Only you don’t know which is which. So you go on instinct, the odds and the vague sense that what worked for you will work for them. And you give them the old heave-ho.

James Tate’s new collection, “The Shroud of the Gnome” (a title that could have graced a Moody Blues or King Crimson album), is his 12th since winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1967. The book continues his sly subversion of the anecdotal poem. For instance, in “Restless Leg Syndrome,” the familiar anecdotal tone of Tate’s first lines is quickly punctured by their spiky abstraction: “After the burial/we returned to our units/and assumed our poses./Our posture was the new posture/and not the sick old posture.” The speaker then reports on all the items — an ocelot, a scrimshaw collection, a snuff box — he uncontrollably kicks, and the poem wraps up with a blow delivered to “the White House we keep on hand/just for situations such as this.” This is high-grade nonsense, undiluted by whimsy, and as such affords more head-scratching than knowing nods.

Another smart bit of funambulistic clowning opens the poem “Twenty-Five”:

Twenty-five is such a big number
if you’re talking about how many times I make love every
day.
But if that’s all the years she lived,
although she was a full-time nudist
and necromancer, it seems so insignificant
and one might even say “Why bother?”

Tate bends and bounces the trite conventions of a birthday wish in a poem that outlines his overall insurgent strategy: “Twenty-five minutes later, he was sleeping like a baby,/which I realize is a cliché and I only say it to punish him, to torment him so that he might in fact/stop ‘sleeping like a baby’ if he so hates clichés.” For readers whose digestion can handle this double-talking, Tate serves his anecdotes well scrambled.

Madonna Anno Domini
BY JOSHUA CLOVER | LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS | 64 PAGES

Joshua Clover’s first book, “Madonna anno domini,” was chosen by Iowa Writing Program doyenne Jorie Graham for the 1996 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and has since garnered a full wreath of attention. But, in the poetry world, where prizes and praise circulate freely in lieu of hard currency, this is no guarantee of anything other than one’s entry into the ledger book of favors done and favors owed. For once, though, the ballyhoo proves accurate: Clover’s poems are smart and jangle with the sound of the broadcast world. “The Nevada Glassworks,” the book’s lead-off hitter, makes personal noise out of history:

Ka-Boom! They’re making glass in Nevada! Figure August, 1953,
mom’s 13, it’s hot as a simile.
Ker-Pow! Transmutations in Nevada!
Imagine mom: pre-postModern new teen,
innocent for Elvis, ditto “Korean
conflict,” John Paul George Ringo Viet Nam.

Clover imagines his mother, a Californian teen, looking east as she “cups an ear to the beloved humming,/the hazy gold dust kicked wildly west,” and, in doing so, he gives vigorous life to tired thoughts about a generation raised under a nuclear cloud.

Like Ashberry, Clover loots the archives for allusions and settings — these poems feel very much blended from texts rather than cobbled together from observing daily life. If you like your verse nitty with verifiable gritty, Clover’s not for you. He invents voices, leaps about in history and presumes much. His “museum poetry” still weighs in more thoughtfully than the mighty coffee-cup epiphanies of more realistic poets. A skillful re-imagining like “Totenbuch,” in which a woman’s head is shaved in a concentration camp, brings to bear an unflinching yet ever aestheticizing eye:

At the edge of her
scalp
was barely scarred in rosy runnels where the razor did the only trick it knew. Snow
dropped along its papery slope as I slept & the lice made entry upon entry into
the skin.

There is, at times, an attenuated quality to Clover’s ruminations — a kind of preciousness that wilts on the vine: “I listened to Cortez, the atonal opera mécanique,/you could spend a siècle waiting for it to begin,/cancel every date, another siècle before the fin.” Yet Clover remains ever alert to the indecipherability of our century’s buzz. Along with his wiry intelligence and nimble vocabulary, he offers the promise of mastery.

Il Cuore: The Heart
Selected Poems 1970-1995
BY KATHLEEN FRASER | WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS | 216 PAGES

“The letter A is a plow,” writes Kathleen Fraser. “Was A/where/you made and/unmade your mind …/first hesitation/when you doubted/what you/thought you/were/looking for?” Language is a tool, the poet observes, to uncover the world and our own doubts. Abiding, as it has through the 25 years of work on display in “il cuore: the heart,” this notion has shaped both the imagistic precision of Fraser’s poems as well as their disjunctive, fragmentary structure. Borrowing the shapes and shadings of letters, lyric odes and mathematical diagrams, she fashions poems where text plays out across the page, collects into dense pockets and energizes the blank spaces with its powerful flaring. Consider “Tree”:

One did hear
the flow of nearby branches
shear occasional and limp
yet this rawness
moves, is
moving
even sudden atrophy
of limb

Lavishing a peculiarly angled attention on Italian landscape and art, Fraser, who lives there part of each year, works her way into the fissures between what’s seen, what’s felt and what’s said. In one of Giotto’s Arena chapel frescoes, she notes a “salmon length of brick the same/as Virgin’s gown, angel feathers/salmon flesh and roe/lifting one swift arc.” Her inventively refractory eye divides the scene into shifting visual panels: “motion (less leaves) blue sky/inlaid their branching/lightness/pale rose breadth/of shade/through intervals.” This is perception perceived: Fraser’s poems interrogate themselves about their own making; her plow slices into the world even as she pulls back to inspect the blade. “The New,” she tells us, “comes forward in its edges in order to be itself.”

The Journals of Susanna Moodie
BY MARGARET ATWOOD | ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES PACHTER | HOUGHTON MIFFLIN | 80 PAGES

The autobiographies of a famous Canadian pioneer woman served as the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s newly reissued 1970 book of poems, “The Journals of Susanna Moodie.” As an English immigrant to the backwoods north of Toronto in the 1830s, Moodie struggled to accept the bleak and often deadly landscape of her new country. Her resistance and eventual acceptance embodies, according to Atwood, a distinctly Canadian “violent duality.” In exploring the contradictory heart of her national identity, Atwood also came to see an inchoate feminism in Moodie’s “thin refusal” to rejoice in the “long hills, the swamps, the barren sand.”

In “The Wereman,” Atwood’s Moodie watches her husband stride off into the forest and she wonders “unheld by my sight/what does he change into.” When he returns, “he may change me also/with the fox eye, the owl/eye, the eightfold eye of the spider/I can’t think/what he will see/when he opens the door.” The metaphor of marriage as a wilderness in which shapes shift and uncertainty reigns is both inspired and apt to Moodie’s historical circumstance — a time when near strangers often married.

By ventriloquizing the reluctant frontierswoman — “I am a word/in a foreign language” — Atwood fuses the interior and exterior landscapes (the personal and political) with a low-key yet vibratory elegance. This slip-cased reprint, with deliciously spooky illustrations by Charles Pachter, is a model of printed art — the high-energy jostling of text and imagery creates a lush detonation that obliterates the slightly over-earnest scent that can cling to these poems in starker circumstance.

James Tate’s new collection, “The Shroud of the Gnome” (a title that could have graced a Moody Blues or King Crimson album), is his 12th since winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1967. The book continues his sly subversion of the anecdotal poem. For instance, in “Restless Leg Syndrome,” the familiar anecdotal tone of Tate’s first lines is quickly punctured by their spiky abstraction: “After the burial/we returned to our units/and assumed our poses./Our posture was the new posture/and not the sick old posture.” The speaker then reports on all the items — an ocelot, a scrimshaw collection, a snuff box — he uncontrollably kicks, and the poem wraps up with a blow delivered to “the White House we keep on hand/just for situations such as this.” This is high-grade nonsense, undiluted by whimsy, and as such affords more head-scratching than knowing nods.

Another smart bit of funambulistic clowning opens the poem “Twenty-Five”:

Twenty-five is such a big number
if you’re talking about how many times I make love every
day.
But if that’s all the years she lived,
although she was a full-time nudist
and necromancer, it seems so insignificant
and one might even say “Why bother?”

Tate bends and bounces the trite conventions of a birthday wish in a poem that outlines his overall insurgent strategy: “Twenty-five minutes later, he was sleeping like a baby,/which I realize is a cliché and I only say it to punish him, to torment him so that he might in fact/stop ‘sleeping like a baby’ if he so hates clichés.” For readers whose digestion can handle this double-talking, Tate serves his anecdotes well scrambled.

Madonna Anno Domini
BY JOSHUA CLOVER | LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS | 64 PAGES

Joshua Clover’s first book, “Madonna anno domini,” was chosen by Iowa Writing Program doyenne Jorie Graham for the 1996 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and has since garnered a full wreath of attention. But, in the poetry world, where prizes and praise circulate freely in lieu of hard currency, this is no guarantee of anything other than one’s entry into the ledger book of favors done and favors owed. For once, though, the ballyhoo proves accurate: Clover’s poems are smart and jangle with the sound of the broadcast world. “The Nevada Glassworks,” the book’s lead-off hitter, makes personal noise out of history:

Ka-Boom! They’re making glass in Nevada! Figure August, 1953,
mom’s 13, it’s hot as a simile.
Ker-Pow! Transmutations in Nevada!
Imagine mom: pre-postModern new teen,
innocent for Elvis, ditto “Korean
conflict,” John Paul George Ringo Viet Nam.

Clover imagines his mother, a Californian teen, looking east as she “cups an ear to the beloved humming,/the hazy gold dust kicked wildly west,” and, in doing so, he gives vigorous life to tired thoughts about a generation raised under a nuclear cloud.

Like Ashberry, Clover loots the archives for allusions and settings — these poems feel very much blended from texts rather than cobbled together from observing daily life. If you like your verse nitty with verifiable gritty, Clover’s not for you. He invents voices, leaps about in history and presumes much. His “museum poetry” still weighs in more thoughtfully than the mighty coffee-cup epiphanies of more realistic poets. A skillful re-imagining like “Totenbuch,” in which a woman’s head is shaved in a concentration camp, brings to bear an unflinching yet ever aestheticizing eye:

At the edge of her
scalp
was barely scarred in rosy runnels where the razor did the only trick it knew. Snow
dropped along its papery slope as I slept & the lice made entry upon entry into
the skin.

There is, at times, an attenuated quality to Clover’s ruminations — a kind of preciousness that wilts on the vine: “I listened to Cortez, the atonal opera mécanique,/you could spend a siècle waiting for it to begin,/cancel every date, another siècle before the fin.” Yet Clover remains ever alert to the indecipherability of our century’s buzz. Along with his wiry intelligence and nimble vocabulary, he offers the promise of mastery.

Il Cuore: The Heart
Selected Poems 1970-1995
BY KATHLEEN FRASER | WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS | 216 PAGES

“The letter A is a plow,” writes Kathleen Fraser. “Was A/where/you made and/unmade your mind …/first hesitation/when you doubted/what you/thought you/were/looking for?” Language is a tool, the poet observes, to uncover the world and our own doubts. Abiding, as it has through the 25 years of work on display in “il cuore: the heart,” this notion has shaped both the imagistic precision of Fraser’s poems as well as their disjunctive, fragmentary structure. Borrowing the shapes and shadings of letters, lyric odes and mathematical diagrams, she fashions poems where text plays out across the page, collects into dense pockets and energizes the blank spaces with its powerful flaring. Consider “Tree”:

One did hear
the flow of nearby branches
shear occasional and limp
yet this rawness
moves, is
moving
even sudden atrophy
of limb

Lavishing a peculiarly angled attention on Italian landscape and art, Fraser, who lives there part of each year, works her way into the fissures between what’s seen, what’s felt and what’s said. In one of Giotto’s Arena chapel frescoes, she notes a “salmon length of brick the same/as Virgin’s gown, angel feathers/salmon flesh and roe/lifting one swift arc.” Her inventively refractory eye divides the scene into shifting visual panels: “motion (less leaves) blue sky/inlaid their branching/lightness/pale rose breadth/of shade/through intervals.” This is perception perceived: Fraser’s poems interrogate themselves about their own making; her plow slices into the world even as she pulls back to inspect the blade. “The New,” she tells us, “comes forward in its edges in order to be itself.”

The Journals of Susanna Moodie
BY MARGARET ATWOOD | ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES PACHTER | HOUGHTON MIFFLIN | 80 PAGES

The autobiographies of a famous Canadian pioneer woman served as the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s newly reissued 1970 book of poems, “The Journals of Susanna Moodie.” As an English immigrant to the backwoods north of Toronto in the 1830s, Moodie struggled to accept the bleak and often deadly landscape of her new country. Her resistance and eventual acceptance embodies, according to Atwood, a distinctly Canadian “violent duality.” In exploring the contradictory heart of her national identity, Atwood also came to see an inchoate feminism in Moodie’s “thin refusal” to rejoice in the “long hills, the swamps, the barren sand.”

In “The Wereman,” Atwood’s Moodie watches her husband stride off into the forest and she wonders “unheld by my sight/what does he change into.” When he returns, “he may change me also/with the fox eye, the owl/eye, the eightfold eye of the spider/I can’t think/what he will see/when he opens the door.” The metaphor of marriage as a wilderness in which shapes shift and uncertainty reigns is both inspired and apt to Moodie’s historical circumstance — a time when near strangers often married.

By ventriloquizing the reluctant frontierswoman — “I am a word/in a foreign language” — Atwood fuses the interior and exterior landscapes (the personal and political) with a low-key yet vibratory elegance. This slip-cased reprint, with deliciously spooky illustrations by Charles Pachter, is a model of printed art — the high-energy jostling of text and imagery creates a lush detonation that obliterates the slightly over-earnest scent that can cling to these poems in starker circumstance.