Animal Planet by David Kirby

DEAREST CREATURE

By Amy Gerstler

84 pp. Penguin Poets. Paper, $18

Look, a poem either sends you a bill or writes you a check. You can use up too much of your intellectual and emotional capital, not to mention your good will, and come away feeling had. Or you can pat your billfold and say, “Hey, this baby just got a little fatter.”

When I’m asked by fellow air passengers what I do for a living and reply, “I write poems,” the reaction is often a startled smile, as though they’re thinking Homer! Dante! Milton! (At least that’s what I’m thinking they’re thinking.) And then comes the lean-in, the furrowed brow, the voice thick with compassion as my new friend says, “But there isn’t any money in that, is there?”

There are some pretty snappy comebacks to this one, but what I usually offer is Somerset Maugham’s “Poetry is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.” Actually, Maugham says “money,” not “poetry,” but that’s the point. Money and poetry both act as catalysts, and they bring together objects and experiences that wouldn’t have anything to do with one another otherwise. Wealth takes many forms, and sometimes it shows up as stanzas.

Amy Gerstler makes this clear in “For My Niece Sidney, Age Six,” the first poem in her delightful new collection, “Dearest Creature.” Like good aunts the world over, she dispenses the info that moms and dads are too squeamish to traffic in, beginning with a factoid that would delight any red-blooded child: the death by boiling of one Margaret Davy in 1542 for poisoning her employer. This is the kind of thing you can discover in any encyclopedia, though no reference book ever breathes

a word about the fact that this humming,
aromatic, acid-flashback, pungent, tingly
fingered world is acted out differently
for each one of us by the puppet theater
of our senses. Some of us grow up doing
credible impressions of model citizens
(though sooner or later hairline
cracks appear in our facades). The rest
get dubbed eccentrics, unnerved and undone
by other people’s company, for which we
nevertheless pine. Curses, outbursts,
and distracting chants simmer all day
long in the Crock-Pots of our heads.

Thing is, nobody knows why Margaret slipped her boss the fatal dose. Now poetry can’t necessarily supply the facts that are omitted in reference books, but at least it permits speculation of the type practiced here, in which an aunt draws on her own experience and the best of her instincts to school a little girl in life’s complexities.

Brain scientists say that the neocortex tries to make sense of the world by asking the hippocampus to replay certain images long enough for a structure to emerge. A poet notices a caterpillar, say, and thinks on it over time, and out of that musing comes “Advice From a Caterpillar,” which recommends molting and self-reinvention, along with cryptic behavior to confuse predators. (“If all else fails,” it concludes, “taste terrible.”) Gerstler has a fondness for critters — birds, moths, nieces — but she never sentimentalizes them. “Interview With a Dog” contains much doggy wisdom; dogs have an especially keen interest in excrement, for example, because it’s news from the interior, “volumes of / urgent correspondence your organs wrote, if only you / knew how to read.” But the conversation breaks off abruptly when the pooch shouts, “THERE’S THE CAT! GET HIM!” and races out of the room.

On the whole, though, Gerstler’s view is more sweeping. In “Letter From the Middle Ages,” the urban population is looking wistfully at the approaching barbarians, who are scary but kind of sexy, too. One civilization is slipping into another, and it’s hard to apply such absolutes as “rise” and “fall” (another useful lesson for that bright penny of a niece to learn).

And while she’s a maestra of invention, Gerstler is not above recycling language when it’s the right thing to do, as it is in “Untranslatable,” where she strings together every cliché in the book (“He picked me up at a greasy spoon,” “he starts giving me the third degree”) to describe a real piece of bad-boyfriend material who’s as irresistible as an ice cream cone on a July afternoon. Singly, these chestnuts fall flat; together, they paint a penetrating portrait of somebody we all recognize, the wrong guy who’s Mr. Right.

As these examples suggest, Gerstler is skilled in every kind of comedy, from slapstick to whimsy. Yet there’s a deep seriousness in every one of these poems, like the plaintive “Midlife Lullaby,” in which the cow who is now the meatloaf in somebody’s sandwich speaks of life’s passing pleasures as hauntingly as one of those skeletons who tend to pop up in medieval allegories to remind young knights of their mortality. And “Broken Lines,” which is dedicated to the memory of the poet Liam Rector, begins: “It’s difficult, though, not to feel / left behind by your suicide, / like a child who flunked / third grade plunked down / in a rickety folding chair / to watch a parade of classmates / graduate.”

As grave as they are amusing and always bittersweet, these poems pay up again and again. “Dearest Creature” is an A.T.M. — the letters standing, in this case, for “artistic thrill machine.” In Amy Gerstler I trust.

David Kirby’s most recent collection is “The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/Kirby-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3