Cement Guitar

In this striking debut collection, Michael Carlson offers poems that combine the concrete and the musical, working with rhythms, structures, images, associational leaps, and an obsession with the sound of words, as opposed to narrative. The book includes four distinct sections. It opens with a sequence of heavily rhythmic poems dealing with the landscape of the Midwest. The second section, which includes the title poem, confronts the terrain and people of Carlson's childhood, using long sentences, risky enjambments, and a colloquial and emotional language. The poems in the third section tend to be more fantastic and approach the poetic tradition from unconventional angles. These include a sonnet whose constraint is that each of its fourteen lines contains a piece of armor, a homage to Ezra Pound using the vocabulary of his first book and the syntax of his last, and the theft of two of John Donne's stanza shapes as an outline for an improbable sermon. In the final section, Carlson examines the present in a sequence of brief notational poems set in Brooklyn.