Thread

Michael Palmer’s new collection is structured in two parts, “What I Did NotSay” and “Thread,” subtitled “Stanzas in Counterlight.” It begins with a beautifulsuite of poems featuring The Master of Shadows (first glimpsed in his 2006collection The Company of Moths). The counterlight of the title section shinesin shafts of Palmer’s ever-surprising ironic wit, which is given to sidelong parallelleaps. Several poems in Thread directly address our endless wars, yet evenin sorrow and rage the poems still glow with wonder. In multiphonic passages,voices speak from a decentered place, yet are grounded in the central rootednessof the whole history of poetry and culture that has gone before. In his newpoems, signature palimpsests create complex cycles of thought, “returning andreturning” via echoes to what he has called “the layering process, the processof accretion and the process of emergence.”

????? Say / that whatever comes / goes. / /
????? The Shadow knows / nothing / such / /
????? His calling. / Round his / listing / /
????? House / the bindweed / grows.