Kirjahaku

In this belated first collection by a celebrated New York poet of the late 1960s and '70s, Mike Silverton lets loose his pataphysical cannons in a salute to the anarchic impulses of art. "Look," he writes, "if the superficial dazzles, depth need not apply." Bring your sunglasses.

Mike Silverton, author of Anvil on a Shoestring, wields surgical instruments of Dadaist precision in this dazzling new sequence of 169 three-line poems in a form he calls Trios: "irreversible tercets in lines of diminishing length."In Silverton's work, poetry approaches the idyllic condition and ineffable significance of music: the autocannibalism of reason reaches its highest, most musical pitch, and absurdity plays musical chairs with the sublime.

In his latest outing, the author of Anvil on a Shoestring and Trios might be said to shake a fist and roar at the dawn "Roll backward into the night ", though such a claim would be entirely without foundation. Still, surely no one but Mike Silverton could be responsible for making such clickety-clackety music with demoralized vermin, vats of cock-a-leekie, and Benedict Arnold's wallpaper, or for attaining such a luxuriant yet persistently procedural climax in the volume's extravagant finale, the poetic abecedary "Geront's Miscellany." Call the police.

This collection of new poems by self-styled "Pony Expressionist" Mike Silverton is augmented by over seventy color photographs by Kevin Johnson of Silverton's painting, assemblage, and sculpture. Includes two Dada manifestos, a note on the objects, and a tauntingly useless Index of First Lines.