The World at Large: New and Selected Poems, 1971-1996 (Phoenix Poets)

James McMichael is one of the finest poets of his generation. Like Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, he studied at Stanford with Ivor Winters during the late 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its height. And like his former master, McMichael is a difficult poet to get hold of. The language in The World at Large tends to be sparse, making its impact through narrative twists and turns rather than individual lines. Yet a little patience on the reader's part will disclose a powerful, if subtle, craft at work.

The 10-page-long "Itinerary" shows McMichael's early mastery of the long poem. Still, this beautifully modulated work seems like a dry run when we turn to a mature production like "Four Good Things." In this sequence, the poet interweaves the history of Pasadena with that of his own family, and the overall effect is devastating: it's one of the great American long poems. It's also one of the few poems that capture Southern California's sleazy grandeur:

Someone from Los Angeles brought in a telephone.
He hooked it up in the store on the southeast corner,
rode back downtown and called and asked for
so-and-so, who wasn't there.

Another book-length sequence, "Each in a Place Apart," alternates long and short sections to narrate the disintegration of the poet's marriage--brutally, painfully, truthfully, but with sparing use of the first person pronoun. Like most of McMichael's work, the effect is altogether personal without being in the least confessional, and it works most powerfully on the subliminal level: the reader is moved without ever quite knowing how it was done. --Mark Rudman