METROPOLITAN TANG.

Cobb, Ann

Black Sparrow Books, David R. Godine, 2008, $1795 cloth, ISBN 9871574232134

As the title of this arresting first collection suggests, Linda Bamber is a city poet. She is also a writer who makes humankind her business. The book's opening poem, "Familiarity," finds her on her bike, riding neighborhood streets in Cambridge, when she happens on the scene of a terrible quarrel between the teenage parents of a terrified little girl:

... As if I were the child I see the mother's violent face
and then her back. I won' t take care of you,

she shouts, and points to him and storms away.
Every bone in the child's body breaks from being dropped
or rather hurled, a clattering breakage of plates in flight.

I don't know you man, says the boy from the street,
but doesn't leave at least. I'm stupefied, straddling my bike
in glasses and mirror-rigged helmet, all this useless

apparatus on my head for seeing
and not getting hurt. Everything that happens
all her life may have to pass through this

cool May 6 p.m., the dandelions in the sidewalk cracks,
the hardware store, the parking lot,
the biker like a staring bug ...

The consequences of this tragic action may not be foreseen with certainty, but its origin, a woman's rage turned on the thing she loves, is territory this poet knows:

Well, that's a woman's weapon, no?
Smash the thing you're known to care about;
rip the shirt you made yourself,

sob in front of guests.
It's over, asshole. You pick up the pieces.
Cry angrily while biking.

Will that show God (who made spring leaves)
how bitterly you disapprove
of his or her arrangements?

Her store of knowledge, wit, and art does not spare her the hurt of the quarrels she has witnessed and experienced. A disintegrating marriage might have been the center of her book; instead it is one of many strands. When anger and tears are exhausted, the light changes, gears shift, and there's a new take on the infinitely various city.

Bamber's poetry, like Frank O'Hara's, is sharp, fresh, and generally conversational, informally phrased and structured. Like him she has fun trolling the world for imagery that sticks: "huge bronze statues / mimicking soft flesh" in Rockefeller Center; characters on an Asian student's laptop displayed "like scattered straw"; crabapple trees in bloom, the "flowers down each branch / like a long lumpy sock. Thick elaborate frills: a / lamb chop bone the chef has taken trouble with."

As a scholar and teacher, Bamber's view of the world is not uncritical. Mocking her own severity, she observes that when the city she lives in suddenly "seems interesting / as if I were on vacation here / and feeling indulgent / towards the human race," it is because a raft of academic questions "just now are in abeyance":

is this city in any way rewarding to look at?
e.g. architecturally, in terms of city spaces and human interest; and
are things diverse enough here? and
are these people, in general,
older or younger than I am?

Her days, like our own, are often saved by chance encounters: the stranger who shares audio guide information at the museum ("whatever movie I'm in,/ he's in, too"); a view of Saturn from a mid-Manhattan telescope, "indifferent, absolute. It seemed an ancestor, long dead / and yet alive"; a Canada goose with a taste for popcorn:

I fed her popcorn from a plastic bag;
 she loved it; so did I.
Then she tucked a leg and napped

 and the afternoon went by
me reading, her sleeping; friends;
 or at least
companions. A goose
is not a longed-for loon; but it's not a nuisance either
 as some people think.
Its shit's just grass! I saw that bird's pink
tongue in her black velvet face.

Black velvet head, immaculate
 white chinstrap

then the elegant long neck
 also black. What's wrong with that?

Like the best and most memorable teachers Bamber brings the past to bear on the present in ways that inform and exhilarate. Mythic characters and events are re-imagined, sacred customs and texts are given a second millennial perspective. In "Coast to Coast: Patriotism in a Time of National Disgrace" the poet is flying across the country in lyrical distress:

My country, 'tis definitely
thee down there, on whom God shed His grace;

but God is not a He

it's more an amber-purple prayer for change
since these days thou
seem'st nuts. Damn! I spent my childhood
poring over place mat maps of thee!
Capitol cities in yellow, principal crops in red.
Friends talk of emigrating: I

Could never go.

An even deeper loyalty integrating this collection is Bamber's devotion to poetry. Her poems celebrate the work of Donne, of Herbert, and of Yeats, poets whose every thought, word, and beat moves toward resolution, as well as that of Stevens and O'Hara, who often invite the reader to connect the dots. Her own poems, like those of Bishop, whose reflections she channels in "Elizabeth Bishop on Brattle Street," while often far-ranging in scope, are brought to conclusions that surprise as well as satisfy.

"Surprise is a fundamental pleasure," Bamber observes in "Passenger Pigeons," the brilliant final poem of her book. It is one that awaits readers of Metropolitan Tang.