Douglas Messerli's Dialogue is made up of two sets of paired poems, Hymns To Him and Maxims From My Mother's Milk. Here is one of the maxim poems:

Meaning meets at the weave of word and frays.

ALLER ET RETOUR

Write often the bat insists. It doubles its lips
and slips into something said. It can never be
natural to wing a sentence when a word might
work for instance, blink and the ball spins
into the glove.

This is one of the shortest poems in the book, but it shows many of Messerli's procedures. It begins with a cliche-maxim that has been re- formed by puns, sound associations, and grammatical shifting. The poem is full of these characteristics, expanding them into a framework with multiple, often conflicting textures. The major dynamic of this poetry is surprise, usually with a strong emphasis on burlesque. The transition from "Write often" (something your mother might ask you to do) to "the bat insists" makes the whack of a baseball against a bat (an old one?) almost audible, while the speech of a Beverly Hillbilly drawls in the background, and the rhymes, assonances and alliterations remain firmly on the surface. In many of Messerli's poems, each new word or line reverses or otherwise dramatically alters the sense of what has preceded it. The sort of wit that generates this shimmering progression of cleverly manipulated language could quickly become cloying if it were not for the Rabelaisian earthiness and pungency of the material used. A quick reading of the book by a sympathetic reader should yield a lot of guffaws and an admiration for the involuted bombast that often depends on both comic sound patterns and an unpredictable play of ideas.

A statement on the dustjacket says that in this book Messerli "probes the dialogue between male and female, wife and husband, mother and father, the masculine and feminine psyches of his own being." Given the rambunctiousness of Messerli's formal approach, you might expect a rather stereotypical examination of gender. But that's precisely what you don't get. Masculine and feminine are presented in terms of linguistic development and can evade, subvert, or slip behind standard dichotomies. Hymns to Him is a pun, and puns have been at the center of much of Messerli's previous work. At present, he claims to be dissatisfied with them, needing to balance his puns with something else. The book is prefaced with a quote from Roland Barthes in which maxims are first derided, then sanctified because they reassure and pacify him. The maxim is the basis of feminine form through the book, carrying on a dialogue with the masculine form, the pun. Hymns (poems of thankful praise) and Maxims (judicious formulas to live by) have been essential to poetry since time immemorial. Though Messerli works against them, he is still using forms that are almost as primal and as basic to language as gender is to human biology. In the fist issue of The Difficulties magazine, Messerli wrote: In my work ... words, words spoken to paper, create their own context, their own reference which may or may not have much contiguity with one's everyday experience in the world. The poem is organized by its own semiotic or linguistic logic ..." In other words, the poems engender themselves. You can see examples of this in the poem quoted above: the whole poem seems to have been spun out of the first phrase; "lips" engendered "slips," as "bat" begat "glove."

Whether a reader finds Messerli's examination of language crucially important or an exercise in solipsism, it would be hard not to be amused by the sound properties of his verse (particularly at present when melopoea is all but forgotten by many poets) and his mercurial wit (particularly now when poetic wit is usually not very much fun or very funny). Anyone interested in further commentary on Messerli should check out the Messerli issue (No. 4) of Aerial magazine.

Virga. Icy Gate, the long poem that makes up about two thirds of Phillip Foss's The Composition of Glass, also works its way through paired sets. The type in the first poem is set so that both right and left edges are justified, and each line has a caesura in the middle, creating a wide river of blank space down the center of the page. The type in the second poem is set with plenty of space between lines, comparable to double spacing in a typewritten manuscript. There are twenty five pairs of these texts, a double spaced poem following each caesura poem, creating a steady modulation between poems with space between lines and space cutting through the middle of poems: horizontal followed by vertical incursions of emptiness. The breaks in the caesura poems are not consistent: sometimes they follow the structure of language in the lines, sometimes they cut across it - they can even split words in half. The caesura poems initiate statements or make propositions. The double spaced poems comment on them or gloss them or present counterstatements.

Pairing plays an important role in "the articulation of predictable randomness" that this work attempts. Virga is a meteorological term for a sort of rain that falls but does not hit the ground. Its water gets part way down but then is blown or evaporated back up to the upper atmosphere. You can see it in the sky but can't feel it. Real as it is, it seems an illusion. The icy gate, on the other hand, is what Foss calls "pure phenomenon:" something palpable, something you can't move or argue with; unlike virga, the atoms in the icy gate move slowly, and that's what makes them seem so comprehensible, even though they're both water. The dialectic of presence and absence, illusion and phenomenon are worked out through a wide array of material and psychological instances, ranging from the colors of two bodies of water coming together to "the way rain distorts the precise perimeters of dried blood on pavement" to the way strong odors cut through abstract speculation. Sky is explored both as natural phenomenon and through its multiple layers of religious and symbolic connotations. Throughout, there is a Rilkean sense of space as prime creator and as ground of terror, as Foss tries to find a link between the space between his fingers and the space of the sky.

This work is firmly based on a voice implied by the text. The voice is steady, matter-of-fact, straightforward, free from phonyness. Its even tone holds together the wide and diverse progression of images and ideas in the poem, a progression that could easily become meaningless or decorative in the hands of a less skillful writer. Though its basic character is stoic, it can bring vivid, almost romantic images into the discourse:

       We would taste                the land of fullness,
       Bury ourselves to be resurrected    with knowledge.
       The landscape is strewn                 with relics
       Of our failure.             A black widow ruminates
       In the last laughter               of the beer can.

Absence, both as discussed in the poem and as presented by the blank spaces on the page, becomes an integral part of the articulation of predictable randomness through conscious presence, the search for a sense of location in a chimerical world. Many poets have addressed the problem of location in flux, but few have done so as directly, as honestly, and as unpretentiously as Foss. Perhaps one of Foss's most important insights is the one that keeps him from trying to find a center in a changing world (which may have made sense in Dante's time), but instead urges him to move with the flux. Given its ability to navigate through an extremely chaotic environment, this is a good book to usher in a new decade.