King Baby
Purpura's charming and mystifying third collection comprises a book-length sequence of attentive, rapturous untitled poems, most of them addressed to the titular figure, who becomes alternately a found doll, a missing child, a spiritual representative of childhood and a real infant to whom the poet gave birth. Purpura (On Looking) captures both the fierce love and the flighty weirdness of life with a baby, opting always for the symbolic and the surprising over the literal record: Come. It's my birthday, she writes, addressing both her readers, and her baby. Make me over/ into a thing a tree could use, like light to drink. Though some readers may feel lost, others should welcome how winter weather, fairy tale scenes and moments of bafflement (You with a block of ice in your head) keep Purpura unpredictable. One of the quieter, sweeter segments compares the poet-as-mother to a builder of playgrounds and to a bowerbird: I went out for a walk to find a blue boat, she says, to remind you of home and having to go/ beyond the known, I did not find a boat/ but more blue things than I thought abound.(Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.