The Hidden Model

The Hidden Model by David Yezzi. TriQuarterly Books, 96 pp., $11.95 (paper). Approaching the world with a steady gaze, Yezzi seeks to penetrate the "mastered certainties" of our lives, attentive to the unseen and overlooked: one figure obscured beneath another model's portrait revealed in restoration; the remains of a wrecking site; indecipherable foreign script; things both "unremarkable and close" that hover at the edges of appearance ("Conversation of the Pharisees").

Whether documenting surprising turns of urban life (an elderly woman fallen after spotting a fox as she steps onto her front stoop for a cigarette, or the purported appearance of Christ's image in a bathroom window) or examining ekphrases, Yezzi's range incorporates sonnet, epithalamium, ekphrastic, pastoral, and epistolary traditions with equal measures of affection and wit. In "Allegro," a poem exploring a relationship's dissolution, Yezzi adapts the monometer used by Herrick to a greater variety of trochaic and anapestic lines, conveying a wry, almost offhanded wisdom, as when the poet observes, "Who thrives, / prevails. / No contact / through the mails, // no telephone." The sonnet "Upon Julia's Breasts" is further evidence of Yezzi's affinity with Herrick: these poets share a deceptive playfulness and a wild civility. Deriding the humorless theories of "our prospective age" that "cannot abide / the mannish gazing that's objectified / the female shape," the poet finds himself "turning chicken," praising "skin / rubbed with fresh herbs," the white meat he prepares under direction of "dear circummortal chef, sweet Julia Child."

A first collection of unusual poise, The Hidden Model is rich in rewards. The poet's emotional and visual acuity is striking. Like the painter "netting with his crosshatch all he saw," Yezzi devotedly re-creates the visible so that "the mundane might offer with its lines / what sighs beneath the surface, even there, / of the unillumined world where it comes clear" ("Morandi's Bottles").

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning