Deborah Slicer, The White Calf Kicks, Autumn House, 2003

One of the real satisfactions of reviewing is the opportunity to introduce an artist in full control of his or her craft. Deborah Slicer is such a poet and her new book, the winner of the 2003 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, such a collection.

Ms. Slicer is a true wordsmith, graceful and controlled, yet enthusiastic and daring enough to invent a few words of her own when needed. She understands the musicality of language; she even uses rhyme, sparingly though and almost never at the ends of lines. Her mastery of the irregular-length line is strikingly her own, owing as much if not more to the ear than to the eye; enjambments are always well chosen and often signify important events in the sense of the movement or in the narrative flow.

The poems are always interesting, often surprising, and usually insightful; running the gamut from sad to elated, serious to funny, self-deprecating to boastful, contemplative to experimental. These are smart poems, never settling for the obvious. This voice is not trying to explain things so much as to homestead the understanding.

Slicer flirts with narrative, very much in the groove that has been developing in American poetry since the days of Elizabeth Bishop -- flashes of story, cohesive moments, cameos and vignettes. It is in this context that Slicer is a student of power. Hers is a voice of great originality. Her metaphors are robust and apt, her similes are freshly conceived, her word choices strong and decisive, her syntax muscular and dynamic. With a vision at the same time piercing and playful, this is satisfyingly intelligent verse.

Loco, the opening poem of the book, is a postmodern version of a medieval threnody of loss. Here it is a lover who has been lost, and though we are never told how, we are told how it feels, and all of nature musters as the vehicle of that telling. Birds, cattle, deer, plants, wind, night, humans, and angels are the assortment that define the circumstance. Four species of birds carry messages between the narrator and her memory; the cattle ground the experience and intensify it; a buck fawn serves to generate a central trope of bruised sensuality; the wind and night establish omniscient perspective on cloaked feelings; and the angel is an agent of frenzied catharsis. The final bird is a metaphysical one, an extension of the narrator which consumes the dregs of loss. Allusions to Shakespeare and philosophy convey the high seriousness of the emotion. The feelings of the narrator spiral murderously outward, then murderously inward -- denial with remembrance, self-pity, pretended indifference, anguish and mourning, and finally resignation and acceptance. The whole is stitched together with the title-pun, loco, both in the sense of crazy and the Latin sense of place. The poem delivers a whiplash certainty and a terrifying originality, as in the trope "lonesome/ as a criminal past."

The exquisite December 10 is in some senses a perfect poem. Visually reminiscent of a George Herbert "concrete" poem, the narrative and the sound guide the reader through a single unexpected moment -- the passing overhead of a lone goose at night. Each element contributes to the experience, allowing us to handle and re-handle the sequence from winter night-to-no bird-to-bird voice-to-all bird-to-bird effect-to-bird gone-to-winter night again. First the animal is heard; "throwing" its voice, the simile -- a double decker -- is wonderful -- "a stone/ skipping out across still water." This both frames the nature of the sound and imitates it, as the 's' sounds and rhythm reproduce that choppy slapping sound made by the stone nicking the surface and then plunging under, and by extension the same kind of sound from the wayward goose. A pause, a sonic caesura, occurs as the narrator introduces the animal at the center of the poem between two paired but not matching winged stanzas, and surmises that it is there at this odd time out of delight -- "A joy ride." Then we see the bird; the trope shifts to the visual in almost a doppler effect, as the whole scene is laid out before us -- "a clean bowl/ waiting to be filled with the most delicious thing." The bird passes over the snowy moon-lit meadow and our vision is 'filled' a second time, as the bird draws along behind it the spectacle of the entire brief and satisfying experience.

There are moments of utter ecstasy scattered throughout the book -- the clever old bull stowing away home in Highline Cosmology; the all-too-satisfied dog in Snowflakes; the place where speech itself breaks down in Cancer: Two Lyrics; the silent battle of wills between Bill Perry and his Percheron in This Is About Darkness. And there is also deep understanding to be found in these pages -- the narrator beginning a three weeks pack into the wilderness the night before the wedding of a decent man she could have had but would have had to follow (Camped Twenty Miles...). A lost balloon gusting in the highway winds forces the narrator into the analysis of self-doubt (Sunflowers, Wyoming). There is also quiet joy in the solace of a pet (I Loved The Black Cat) and in the rough gratification of becoming nativized to a region (Scapegoat Mountain).

The poems are unified by voice, but they are disparate in subject and setting. A good number of the poems are set in her childhood spent on a farm. Here one sees the development of a defining relationship with animals. Other poems are still-life pictures constructed around the beauty of the world -- one of them Ms. Slicer calls "a pastoral." About half the poems are discursive colloquies, a sort of pre-metaphysical divestiture of the narrator's emotional understanding. They do not seek, but often find, a kind of closure, frequently based on informed acceptance, but a wide ranging palette is available; sometimes they simply rage at the perceived state of things.

This is an intelligent book, but not in the way one might expect. There are no social theories cleverly portrayed, no knowing analyses in verse of other writer's works, no learned discourse fondly displayed. For the most part the intelligence resides wholly within the observations and Slicer's way of putting them. In describing a Percheron, the largest of horses (This Is About Darkness), she observes, "He's made from endurance/ like a hummingbird," and the reader's mind gulps in awe at the accuracy of such a trope. Or when (Shiners) she wishes to note the patience (and a bit of the praxis) necessary to entice a fish into one's hand, she tells us, "I sit with my mind tucked under my wing like a sleepy heron." In the poem Snow, we are given an epitome of 'cold' coupled with the exact geography as the sound of the ice opening up on the river near Cincinnati is dubbed "Kentucky and Ohio/ breaking a bone between them." Or a dog is individualized in Outside Of Richmond, Virginia, Sunday, with "....the black mutt/ with the white patch like a slap on his rump." We have heard of but not seen such marvels before.