The Two Yvonnes: Poems (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)
Greenbaum’s second poetry collection adopts a smart, New York-centric style recognizable from her first book (Inventing Difficulty, 1998), and many of its poems have appeared in The New Yorker over the last decade. This is perfectly appropriate, as Greenbaum’s work, written in the everyday patois of urban Americans, has been characterized as edgy and idiosyncratic, localized and wry, and she’s earned comparisons to Whitman and Hart Crane for her lyrical familiarity with the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and environs. But these more recent poems, especially the longish, proselike columns of narrative rambling, remind one of W. G. Sebald’s associative flights, or of long conversations with a terribly interesting interlocutor, one whose stories veer down amusing tangents only to swerve back with an arresting image: a small child’s empty sickbed, lovers in late October, “the orange noise of birds.” And Greenbaum’s storyteller is not just interesting, but interested, and invested, in the world. Be it a kibbutz outside Tel Aviv, or Texas in the twentieth century, hers is a truly cosmopolitan perspective, refreshing and unique, but now practiced and increasingly refined. --Diego Báez--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.