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Like Clare Pollard, Peter Tomassi has had poems in previous issues of Magma. We have liked them for their contemporary, almost brutal, density and, at the same time, their feeling for the vulnerable. Presented at book length, however, these qualities become attenuated.

The book begins promisingly with several meditations on aspects of masculinity: physical work, writing as physical work, the anxiety of fatherhood, dinner with a man who eyes the poet’s companion with desire:

It makes sense.
All men secretly love the same kind of pornography,
A blend of flesh carved from stone and old fashion
                                                                    magazines
To which he is all complement, bits the sculptor cast aside
and sewed loosely into ancient Spanish Leather.
                                                            (Dinner with Pedro)

Here doubts begin to set in. The writing moves from a realistic perception about the basic nature of male desire into increasingly abstract (“complement”) and ornate language (“old fashion magazines”, “sculptor”, “ancient Spanish leather”). The effect is to muffle and dissipate the urgency of the original perception.

Unfortunately this happens quite often in Tomassi’s poems. Most are meditations on everyday experience where a striking idea is weakened by resorting to abstractions (words like “hero”, “sinful”, “faithless”, “sweetly” which sound good but, ungrounded in feeling, convey no meaning), to classical allusions and to exaggeration:

A six pack of Bud in August
More to them than a thousand ice ages.
                                              (Builders in Toms River)

The two most successful poems are the most literary and artful: Fetch, an immensely clever poem in which the poet and his companion are imaged as dogs - too subtle and tightly written for brief quotation to do it justice - and the brilliant final poem, Poultry Sale, where poultry means the paltry remains of poetry:

Hide Neruda’s foreskin and Byron’s underwear.
They’re upsetting the customers.
Could someone please find this man Rilke’s ear?

I suspect that Tomassi should play to this strength, leave his meditations on the workaday world and go full tilt for joyous irony.