a new measure (poetry report)

Man with Head Removed is a volume of “new and collected” poetry. Comprising New Age Self-Help (chapbook), Nature Poems (full length), Boston Spleen (chapbook—prose poems), and Man with Head Removed (recent poems), it possesses the weight and variety necessitated by a “collected” volume. Indeed, if there is a critique that can be leveled against the book it is simply that it is so long, its weight and variety at times overpowering the power each book has on its own.   That said, there is a clear through-line articulated by the book/s, explicitly addressed in the first poem: The “being” of a flickering flame is a dance (occur ance ), the so instantaneous as to almost not have happened growth and decay of which is captured by caesurae in the line “decay growth and decay—again growth! // at the same time! it decays!” Here, Robinson uses the flickering flame as an almost Transcendental symbol (in the sense of words being signs of natural facts, and natural facts bein...