Anabranch (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
In this quiet, second collection Zawacki, who is co-editor ofVerse, circumnavigates a gray, dead-end lyric tributary (an "anabranch" being a river's arm that bogs down in sandy soil), tracking a figure who "followed himself and forgot/ himself... who counterfeited/ the garroted path, then counter-/ feited himself." The poet's proxy moves tentatively; his philosophical queries turn to bewilderment and wonder, his selves perpetually dissolving, trying to lash themselves back together: "one of me stuttered and one/ of me broke, and one of me tried// to fasten a line to one of/ me untying it from me." At their best, these lyrics are as haunting and delicate as early C.D. Wright, with a similar, reluctant faith in breath and water, light and snow, a similar penchant for devastating plainsong: "I would say/ I love her, but I is too strong a word/ and love not strong enough." Less successful than the first two lyric series is the book's final section, a prose poem sequence in which the slippage between landscape and imagination is made explicit: "Such were the spells of a landscape that couldn't be trusted although we'd devised it ourselves, if only to attribute otherwise...." Paradoxically, this section reads as evasive, offering moments of overt interpretation or tangible scenic grounding (the docks, the factory, the swimming hole), which are then submerged in opacity and abstraction.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.