Thieves' Latin

by Peter Jay Shippy. University of Iowa Press, 86 pp. (paper), $13.00. Winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize, Thieves' Latin is a delightful introduction to a poet whose wit and wordplay counterpoint a fierce poetic inquiry. "No bird has / been written about so much by poets as the nightingale," he writes in "Why Is the Crow a Harmful Bird?" observing that "The attempt to download its odes goes back to Sappho." Characterized by jazzy diction and surprising if not surreal imagery (a neighbor doing tai chi is "posing like a Giacometti"; voices heard at a distance are "teen tuneage"; the book's locales include "Little Poe Station," "The Bowling Pin Forest" and "The Baudelaire Hospital & Grill"), this collection follows the mind's arc as it warpspeeds between the marvelous and the mundane. "There are stranger elsewheres?" the poet asks, skeptically regarding the vastly dynamic terrain he inhabits. A few lines into an elegy for a lost friend, for instance, he observes that clouds appear "dopey like summer sheep or helium balloons away / above the taut wires which are fences or strings," an observation that gives way to speculation on the vestigial nature of language itself: "Every void describes a world. Every void describes a word" ("Bunnyman, an Elegy").

Elsewhere the poet's concerns turn to the affects and objects proliferated by mass culture, such as the "barbiturate blue/organdy ottoman" and "framed repro / of Rothko's / Black on Grey" in the temples of the "Mystic / Pottery Barn" ("Alien Immigrant"). Ever cognizant of poetry's redemptive force, Shippy resists playing the dystopian prophet. If the modern city is an "architecture of impatience / with a hint of humanity," there are still odd wonders in store: in "Nauman's PsalmBook," the poet imagines what happens once "genoming opens our ears to inhuman range" and the scales of pleasure are so fundamentally transformed that "a lilting Chopin Ballade / will bring us tidal pain." Still, the the poet forsees a measure of grace: "great joy" will be discovered in "listening to soprano white smoke / float from brick stacks, or from the thespian notes / of a brown spider slinging her webs against glass."

Filled with a techno-beat cleverness that captures "these vertiginous times," Thieves' Latin introduces a poet of unique range and distinction, the "odd voice whistling on the breeze" to "awake your comforting verse" ("Caught Between the Twisted Stars").

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