Books Noted: Bernadette Mayer’s Poetry State Forest

Bernadette Mayer’s wonderfully various book contains nature poems, sonnets, prose poetry, pastiches, long sequences, and epigrams. What these poems share is playful directness, a cunning humor, and the intent to honestly and smartly look at all the most interesting parts of life. John Ashbery wrote, "The richness of life & time as they happen to us in tiny explosions all the time are grasped and held up for us to view in [Mayer’s] magnificent work." A lovely poem that drifts in and out of dreaming about a beloved, ends, "love is not the same but keeps that name / i am inland, but i must be you / even though by now you must be at the shore." Though it may be hard to parse, the direct and wistful quality of this poem is both felt and understood. The book opens with a poem about how, when the speaker took her children to poetry readings, she also took chocolate bars "to make the poetry palatable or / more interesting or so they’d / be relatively quiet." The poem playfully builds and ends "poetry is as good as chocolate / chocolate’s as good as poetry." After reading this collection, one cannot help but agree.