Title: Michael's Ear
Author: Michael Malinowitz
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, New York

Michael Malinowitz's poetry both baffles and delights. As one reads his poems, she marvels at their strange energy, their arcing between sense and absurdity, and their faith in the free mind. They are amazingly deceptive, negotiating between stream of consciousness and inevitable eruptions of serendipitous meaning. Such lines as "She moves, and you wish you were her"; "After all, we are all/ Put on display, as we build our bodies and share them"; "Everyone' picture is taking"; and "who can report us but the dead" hit the reader with epigrammatic force. Many of these lines are also funny, catching us by surprise with unexpected shifts, odd conclusions, surreal observations and unabashed fancy. Like John Ashbery, Mr. Malinowtiz undergirds his authority with the natural play of language itself, as it to say between each line, with zenlike conviction: Coherence is an illusion. Sense is miscarried by meaning. One must trust in the source.

The source, at least in Mr. Malinowitz's imagination, is everything at once that breaks down into runic synechdoches. Although the reader may not always follow the poet, she is mesmerized by the engaging sound of his absurd sense. A new sense is divined in these peculiarly American koans, antitheses against confusion." Mr. Malinowitz's invitations to confusion welcome that the poet Terry Hummer has called "the wound of incoherence," a conscious suffering that one receives when she accepts the challenge of authoring her own life, of discovering the difficulty and absurdity of life behind the convenient fictions of social order, of willfully separating herself from the Leviathan. For Mr. Malinowitz this would leads to the implicit belief in the bonus of chaos, where connections are made unseemingly within the disparate milieu of difference and strangeness. This belief harkens back to the archetype of creation myths in which order is brought mysteriously out of the void. Although difficult for their incoherence, these poems are also ironically generous, providing their audience with ready-made anodynes to hackneyed logic. They understand from the start that the unconscious provides the only common ground between the poet and her reader, and that this ground is a playground where from accommodates symbol, where "there seems to be one overriding care, / And you knew I would say it when I said it to you."

Chard deNiord

These are poems that sparkle, and their inventive, adventurous spirit makes them an adventure also for the reader. All of them are full of a truthful, warm humanity; all are completely free of affectation and pomposity. They're full of mystery and curiosity. Unpredictable details, and insights you could never find for yourself, are set side by side in such a way that one brings out the brilliance of the other. The effect of this is constantly surprising. There are other poems which tell their story more plainly. But you have to read them all. Each poem is quite different from the others, in such a way that together they form a whole.

Anne Porter