Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (National Poetry Series)

Rating:
Summary: Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross
Review: Mark Yakich's poetry is like the first strawberry of a delayed spring. That blessed tang. Yes! This is what your palate craved in the dark months after Clementines quit tasting like their name. For the jaded winter appetite, sustained on broths and highly seasoned root vegetables, it is a singular delight.

Singular, not simple-many of the poems are accessible in their unadorned language, yet difficult to get the mind around in a casual read-through. Whether the reader succeeds or remains puzzled, each poem is an individual to appreciate.

Subjects range from love and the conundrums of relationships to a short meditation on raisins. Tone varies from playful, as in a bawdy rope-skipping ditty, ("Songs of Salience and Ambience") to melancholic, ("Old Celery") to matter-of-fact: "A Lover's Education" is as plainspoken as an overheard conversation, but includes, and concludes with, lines as memorable as Donne's.

Girding the book is a sweet-tart but compassionate humor you might expect in a Jewish grandmother. Although wry, it is not cynical. The voice is not one of a young adult bitter upon discovering that life and love are not what he'd thought they would be. It reveals an acceptance of the way things are, with the vigor of one who refuses to take it sitting down.

There are plenty of good poets working today, but you'd be hard pressed to find a book of poems more surprising and delightful.