Salt Water Amnesia
Quiet, thoughtful, sympathetic, and mostly in prose, the meditations in Skinner's fifth volume reflect on middle age, on the death of his father, and on his year living by the Connecticut shoreline, where commuter trains shoot past shopping centers and whitecaps, and "all language moves out to sea." One series of prose poems uses ski lifts and Styrofoam cups to comment on improvement. Another series memorializes Skinner's father by alternating painful remembered events with bleakly comic, dreamlike (or Russell Edson-like) fantasies: "I sewed my father into a specially designed, handmade bear suit." Skinner has edited a volume of poems about alcoholism and recovery, and co-edits Kentucky's Sarabande Press. His prose poems may strive too hard for calm and resolve, dialing their language down too far; they work best when he permits himself anger or humor (as in "Day One," which makes fun of famous writers who resolve to compose one poem per day). Skinner's few lineated poems are the best in the book: "The Climbers," "Darwin's Marathon," and a few others find the verbal energy, and the bitterness kept in check, that distinguished his standoutGender Studies(2002) and remind followers how sharp this poet's language can be.(Sept.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.