Books: Away the Lifeboats!

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If a poem is read aloud in a bookstore but no one is around to listen to it (because everyone is off sipping espresso in the cafe or skimming the latest shock-a-minute memoir), does it make a sound? This April--designated National Poetry Month by the Academy of American Poets--might be a good time to ponder that question. More admired in principle than in practice, more respected than read, American poetry has survived the '90s through a combination of benign neglect, accumulated goodwill and a devoted cult of readers who will still be on deck reciting favorite lines should the poetic Titanic ever go down. But there's good news: the lifeboats have been launched. This publishing season brings three books--J.D. McClatchy's Ten Commandments, Yusef Komunyakaa's Thieves of Paradise and Deborah Garrison's A Working Girl Can't Win--with room for passengers of every class.

Ten Commandments (Knopf; 96 pages; $21) is the finest of the three volumes, a reputation-making wonder that isn't just the year's best book of poems but may also turn out to be the year's best book. Poised, architectural and built to last in the effortlessly disciplined tradition of W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell, the poems also have a sharp confessional kick worthy of Anne Sexton at her most bruising. In "My Mammogram," McClatchy, 52 (editor of the Yale Review and author of the libretto for Emmeline, a new opera by Tobias Picker that opens next week at Lincoln Center), recounts a disturbing examination for cancer of the male breast: "Mammography's on the basement floor./ The nurse has an executioner's gentle eyes./ I start to unbutton my shirt. She shuts the door." The diagnosis: no malignancy, but an identity-warping excess of the female hormone estrogen. "The end of life as I've known it, that is to say--/ Testosterone sported like a power tie... "

Ten Commandments is divided into sections that correspond to the laws on Moses' tablets ("My Mammogram" counts the virile male physique as perhaps the ultimate graven image). Its theology is deeply personal, more biographical than biblical. "My Old Idols" remembers the crisp erotic sting of a parochial school instructor wielding a pointer while drilling pupils in Greek: "Accounts of murder and sacrifice/ Only suggested the heavy price/ I longed to pay at his behest." Born on the Main Line, an upscale, old-money suburban Philadelphia neighborhood, McClatchy has an aristocratic tartness that comes through both in his stanzas and in his remarks about poetry in general, which he sees slipping into sloppy populism. "There are a lot of Sunday painters out there; they don't expect their paintings to hang in museums. But every time someone puts down his feelings on a piece of paper, he expects to be published. It's an art, after all," McClatchy says. "It's not just a feel-good sort of thing."