Laurence Goldstein

continued

A Room in California, his most recent book, shows the range of a lifetime devoted to his craft. Goldstein is unafraid of being formal and sonorous, and he feels no need to strain to be hip, even when writing about movies. The collection ends with a tour de force, a poem of forty-five eight-line stanzas called "Meetings with Prester John." It mixes medieval legend and fanciful adventures with a completely contemporary sensibility, allowing the prophet Daniel to stand next to Henry Kissinger and Eric Ambler. The poem is a wild, occasionally difficult ride that jumps through time and across history, pulling a longing for fanciful, undiscovered places in its wake.

Ann Arbor audiences might be especially interested in a poem about the statue that dominates the entry to the U-M Museum of Art, "Randolph Rogers: Nydia, The Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii." We may enter the museum to escape for a moment the usual things ("The big doors close out what's contemporary: / the noise of a living culture, the earthshake / of lurid bulletins, each a brutal crime"), but in Goldstein's vision the sculpture of the blind girl trying unsuccessfully to escape the eruption of the volcano becomes a vision of all victims: he gazes upward at her, "where the imaginary smoke of extinction / gathers like the vanished clouds of 1945." The art is no escape.