The Strange Hours Travelers Keep [Hardcover]

In Kleinzahler's first since his 2000 selected, Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club, brain surgery, an "old poet, dying," fighter planes, Andres Segovia and "a computer-generated Weimaraner" stand among the grand array of metaphors, objects and offhand stories that make this volume his most coherent and most thoroughly enjoyable to date. The title promises poems set all over the world; the New Jersey-bred poet obliges with landscape poems set in Germany, Texas, New England and "the snowy passes of the Carpathians," where the poet follows a Mongol horde. Kleinzahler is also a jazz critic; in the ambitious five-part "A History of Western Music" he shows himself at home with classical works but fascinated by popular performers from Liberace to June and the Exit Wounds. A series of poems adapted from Horace proves less complicated but almost compulsively quotable: one advises against "daydreaming" ambitions, concluding: "The weather here stinks, and neither of these girls is for you." Kleinzahler can leap, within a few lines, from science-speak ("collateral sulcus") to tough-guy talk ("Murph lent me his putty knife"); that code-switching range, along with his set of personae, add up to poem after poem nobody else could have written, despite their similarity to each other. Readers attracted to Kleinzahler's distant Beat forebears should appreciate the ambling free verse gleaned from urban strolls, while those who seek more ambitious work will find it in his meditations on music and art: "even the painter," he concludes, "must be destroyed/ in order that we may become the paint."
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The title poem in Kleinzahler's tenth book begins, "The markets never rest / Always they are somewhere in agitation," lines that can serve as a key to this frenetic and wily collection. Kleinzahler is a poet of motion and moil fascinated by all that humans invent to keep themselves busy and dizzy and safe from sorrow's dark draw. Kleinzahler is dazzling as he conjures the zip of cyberspace, the churn of garbage scows, the roar of jets, all the contraband, produce, and products routinely hauled north from Mexico as well as the stinging nettles of gossip, petty rivalries, and peccadilloes. He is funny, waspish, and fanciful, coyly forthright about his preference for scintillating civilization over dull nature, and wildly enamored of music, a passion that inspires spiked reflections on the reception of black jazz musicians in postwar Paris. Echoes of Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Merrill can be heard in Kleinzahler's alert and worldly, clever and catty poems, little cyclones spinning feverishly over the precipice. Donna Seaman
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