A Night in Brooklyn

"Flatlands," "A Stoop in Bensonhurst," "Twilight in Canarsie": urban working-class neighborhoods set the scene for many of the poems in this collection by Brooklyn's former poet laureate and author of nine earlier books of poetry (The Border Kingdom). The voices here emerge from behind sooty walls and layers of paint, breathing hopeful despair into mirrored interiors: "I love my life, she says,/ but really I would like to be elsewhere." Like the arguing neighbors "on that linden-shaded industrial block/ between Linwood and Crescent," the speakers seek an elusive wormhole into another world, "the night sky hidden/ at the center of the last period." As time and space play their disorienting tricks, the present discloses a foreboding future: "Which of us was crying?/ Would we ever know?" When the dead enter (the speaker's ghost father comes into a bar for a glass of muscatel), it is like the old joke without a punch line: there may be humor here, but it is buried deep.