Peccadilloes

The poems in Jan Schreiber's remarkable new collection enter through the ear as well as the eye, but they quickly capture the mind and the heart. Subtle and multi-layered, sensuous, witty, and often deeply moving, they enlist the reader as an ally, one able to share the poet's sense of wonder, his probing curiosity, and his wry astonishment at the quirky eccentricities of humankind.

Jan Schreiber's new book of poems is full of people: Scoop (too drunk to fight), Buddy's daughter (due in May), the Reverend Charles Colby, the storekeeper's wife, the senior psychoanalyst (who dances like a dervish), the aging lover, the man of the world (eying a balcony covered with vines), the artist Moses Soyer, the stone mason, the wasp-girl, Vermeer's singer (the light is in her eyes), the grifter at Heaven's Gate, the poet's wife (a painter), Adam, Zeno, Death, Calypso, a bunch of teenagers on the back of a yellow pickup truck. His Human Comedy is much like Balzac's for its wealth of characters, humor, and bitter wisdom, though since Schreiber is a poet the narratives are washed and submerged, like islands, by image and melody-the glinting surface of the verse-that still reflects them clearly when the tide is high.

-Emily Grosholz

As King Duncan learned the hard way (and more than once ), "There's no art / To find the mind's construction in the face," but then he'd never read Jan Schreiber. Schreiber possesses an uncanny gift for seeing past "the common guise many have learned to wear." Whether it's the brave face put on by a dying friend, the shucking of a small-time con man at the Pearly Gates, or the thoughts of a figure in a stolen Vermeer, Schreiber goes beyond the subterfuge of surfaces into the very life of things. He is as incisive in lapidary "short takes" ( la J. V. Cunningham) as he is in sinewy sonnets and mazy pastorals of rural Maine, exposing by turns our peccadilloes and our more serious infractions: "And to what hell in time are they consigned - / the instants when in rage or carelessness / someone destroyed a lovely, hard-won thing?" Fortunately for us, the familiar foibles catalogued in Jan Schreiber's glorious collection are amply atoned for, again and again, through his poet's grace.

-David Yezzi