Fails to "separate from the rummage"

A Several World by Brian Blanchfield
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When you try to condense your critical opinion of a collection of poems to a number of stars, you realize the inadequacy of ratings.

I admire much of Brian Blanchfield's ambitious and generous collection. He has a gift of the short and pungent phrase, epigrammatic without being obvious. His language has echoes of the lusciousness of Wallace Stevens and the obscure juxtaposition of John Ashberry. Blanchfield interplays the grammatical, the etymological, and the personal in interesting ways.

But when I am done, and I ask if I willread it again, I must admit that the answer is probably no. I admire the effort and often the craft. But I am left cold and oddly noncurious. Perhaps it is my failure as a reader. Perhaps the work in the end fails to "separate from the rummage."

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