More Things in Heaven by David Yezzi. Measure Press, 2021. 155 pp. $25.00 (hard cover)

It’s only fitting that David Yezzi’s quietly dazzling volume of selected poems would take as its title Hamlet’s famous observation to Horatio. Not only do his poems range widely between the cosmic and the quotidian, the wondrous and the workaday, but the poet is himself a veteran denizen of the stage. Yezzi has acted in productions of Shakespeare, Brecht, and other titans, written his own verse plays (most recently, Schnauzer: a play in one act, produced in 2016 at Baltimore’s Single Carrot Theater), and consistently brought to his writing an ear for meter and a flair for the dramatic that are marked by singular intelligence and range. A longtime member of The New Criterion’s editorial staff and, currently, editor of The Hopkins Review and chair of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, Yezzi holds impressive credentials—the more reason, perhaps, for setting them aside and paying close attention to the poetry itself. Technical facility, keen insight and compassion, the ability to occupy perspectives not his own, genuine wit—these are the gifts of our best actors, and our best poets also, however undervalued in today’s literary landscape which tends to favor sensational content and flashy effects. By contrast, More Things in Heaven offers something more lasting: a thoughtful overview of a life’s work at mid-career that is keenly attuned to human psychology, the textures of setting, the passage of time, and the subtle sonics that lift everyday language into poems of power and beauty.

The afterword of the chapbook version of Yezzi’s verse play “Tomorrow & Tomorrow” features Denis Donoghue’s shrewd assessment of the poet’s skills: “[Yezzi’s] normal style is civic; by which I mean that his poems are written in the middle style which we associate with urbane conversation, the decencies of a fine mind thinking by itself, wondering, hoping.” (“Tomorrow & Tomorrow” was later published in Yezzi’s Birds of the Air and is among the selections included here.) Donoghue’s assessment is meant, in part, to draw a contrast with Yezzi’s declaration of his own verse play as a “travesty”—a subgenre Donoghue takes to include parody, farce, irony, satire, and more, and one perfectly suited to the bad part-time actor that is the verse play’s protagonist. What strikes me, however, is the extent to which Yezzi’s undeniably literary leanings have, in recent years, evolved to absorb and encompass a vast range of voices, moods, and characters that are far more complex than Donoghue’s otherwise apt judgment would imply.

More Things in Heaven includes eight poems from The Hidden Model (2003), the poet’s debut, and these do embody a cultured, conversational approach. “Conversation of the Pharisees” (after “The Hundred Guilder Print,” a Rembrandt etching) is an exemplary ekphrastic poem whose five-line stanzas of varying line lengths (pentameter, tetrameter, pentameter, dimeter, trimeter) demonstrate Yezzi’s ability to sustain a train of thought while peering past the obvious:

Such upright citizens, all honest Joes,
these legal men sketched in at left
so sparingly they almost blanch from view;
how they huddle,
dull to radiance

and fouled in the lines affixing them,
oblivious to Christ’s light caught
across their faces, like a harrowing
of their tight circle,
as they natter on.

Here and elsewhere in the selected volume, the kinship between Yezzi’s work and that of Anthony Hecht is evident—not only in its confident management of varying line lengths, but in its tone and texture of perceptive curiosity: surfaces are captured in quietly stunning language but, at the same time, closely questioned for what they may suggest or hide. (Hecht’s influence continues to bear fruit: one of Yezzi’s current projects-in-progress is an authorized biography.) In the poem’s second half, the author skillfully mediates between engraving and viewer: “And we are quick / to read the gulf between // ourselves and those gray priests in antique hats / …and wise to the fact of their ignorance, / though we, like them, / have missed the central point…” From Rembrandt’s depiction of Christ among smug Pharisees and enlightened listeners, Yezzi infers a deeper lesson—one whose didacticism is leavened by perfect pacing and a flawless ear: “they are there for us, to represent / those from whom the truth’s been held.”

“The Double,” a more personal poem, further demonstrates Yezzi’s meditative bent. Due to a fleeting misperception, an old man glimpsed across Central Park’s Sheep Meadow turns out to be the same age as the speaker (Yezzi was under forty when the poem was published). The stranger’s approach through a springtime crowd of “sunning bodies” is meticulously depicted—”And as he comes across the wide expanse / of green he seems to float over blowing shoals, / walking on the risen Styx, and hunched”—only to be suddenly transformed:

Now close, he looks like me. Strange to think
that he’s no nearer age and death than I,
the young man walking out of the older man
like a snake skin shed, the same one he will wear
again someday.

The poem is less remarkable as memento mori than it is as evidence of the poet’s ability to breathe new life into traditional subject matter. The Central Park setting, the controlled yet discreetly panicked voice, the care with which the speaker revises his initial impression (“How had there been a cane?”) combine to raise a passing moment to the level of lived experience. (The comparison of shed snakeskin to an old man’s wrinkled flesh is especially vivid.) It is “Hand to Mouth,” however, which points the way to the mode that most fully engages the range of Yezzi’s talents: the dramatic monologue—especially, one whose speaker is more observer than participant, ambivalent in his loyalties yet deeply faithful to his reporting of each detail and impression. The simple title is richly resonant: “hand to mouth” not only refers to characters who live at the edge of poverty but also to the restaurant setting that serves as narrative frame for the speaker’s recollections (and, perhaps, the impulse to stop ourselves from saying what’s forbidden). Sharing a meal with his partner, the speaker observes the break-up of another couple while remembering old friends who weren’t exactly friends: a young couple who trades bohemian Brooklyn poverty for freeloading in a Greek village, and another couple who break up after the husband suffers a manic episode. However, it is the speaker’s broader response to the complicated dynamics of friendship that hit squarely home.

He’s lost his mind again (believes he’s Christ)
and disappeared more fully than the friends
we keep as enemies, whom we still prize,
since secretly we can’t abide a world
that they’re not in, so rather than expel
them fully from our thoughts we hold them close
and scorn them, as they do us, with the same
shared venom, although once we called it love.

In lines like these, Yezzi’s meditative mind turns over painful riches. From the vanishing of those with whom we’ve lost contact, the poet turns to the nature of friendship itself: the soured connections that stubbornly occupy our minds; unspoken shared ambivalence; the ways that attachment is equally strengthened by love or scorn. The speaker’s ruminations distinguish between degrees of friendship, ending with the possible break-up—or reconciliation?—that he and his partner are witnessing across the restaurant. Given the poem’s contemporary setting and Yezzi’s careful mirroring of multiple couples in this monologue, it’s tempting to assume that author and speaker are, effectively, one. More significantly, however, “Hand to Mouth” is an early model for the sort of contemplative dramatic monologue that Yezzi continues to practice with ever-increasing confidence and an ever-widening range of voices, settings, and effects.

More Things in Heaven collects an impressive array of shorter poems as well. In selections from Azores (2008), “The Call” extends the poet’s pained considerations of loss and friendship in pentameter quatrains that question the speaker’s feelings on receiving the news of an annoying acquaintance’s death, while “Acceptance Speech” employs dimeter (and a few tetrameter) lines with playful rhyme to trace the small and large afflictions most of us live with: “Accept the things you cannot change: / … neural chemistry, / patchy hair, / a longing stare / and x-ray eye, // and the niggling fact / that things will stay / roughly this way, / to be exact.” The poem is notable for its Larkinesque wit and decidedly non-Larkinesque turn toward genuine acceptance. The sequence “Azores,” included in full, consists of nine accomplished sonnets that stand winningly on their own, or as the collective reinvention of an Atlantic sailing trip that serves as metaphor for restless desire: “A green island draped in volcanic smoke, / imperceptible at first, until the reek / of musk wafts to us seaward over a league, / like the pong of love-sheets a summer night has soaked, / retaining, in the after-dawn, the very smell / that brought the madness on.”

The excellent selections from Yezzi’s more recent books, Birds of the Air (2013) and Black Sea (2018) further confirm the poet’s growing achievement in his art. More and more, in both short and longer poems, he adopts the voices of characters plainly different from himself, his metrical facility undimmed by the use of more idiomatic language. “Spoils” is superb, a monologue whose blue-collar speaker recounts (among much else) his theft of two wristwatches from the personal effects left in an apartment whose tenant will never return: “He wasn’t coming back to this apartment, / not dead, you see, but never coming back. / My job was to sort out all of the trash, / which was everywhere, on every surface, / like the very air had sprouted clods of mold, / smelly tumors. Everywhere. More trash.” Here we can relish how actor and poet join together, their complementary skills generating a multidimensional character study in convincing, yet musical, language. Elsewhere, too, this casually playful style retains the electric metrical charge of Yezzi’s earlier work: in “Lazy”’s impatient complaints (“—a radio with in-and-out reception / blaring like hell when it finally hits a station”); in “Itchy”’s playful paean to the pleasures of scratching (“You snake your fingers in / until your nails possess the patch of skin / that’s eating you”); or in “Free Period” in which the poet resurrects an adolescent voice to vividly capture teenage longing:

I see him raise

his hand to her head
from the back, so gently
she doesn’t notice
him at first, but stands there,
carved in ebony

and beaten gold:
Stacey’s straight black hair
falling in shafts of sun.
He smoothes it down,
firmly now,

so that she turns,
kind of freaked, as if to say,
“Can you believe it?”

This perfectly realized balance of ordinary speech and heightened language is one of Yezzi’s best assets. Accordingly, it makes sense that, instead of featuring some grand stylistic break or abrupt change of approach, Yezzi’s evolution reflects his accumulating life experience, growing wisdom, and continuing skill. Poetry written to grab attention need not look deeply into character or at the surrounding world, but Yezzi’s poetry always does, and earns our notice by subtler means: with fresh language and genuine insight into people.

The eighteen new poems that open More Things in Heaven stand with Yezzi’s very best. One of my favorites is “Tyger, Tyger,” its Blakean title and elegant long lines providing witty contrast to the slangy yet elevated rhetoric surrounding its protagonists, two philosophically inclined potheads who discover a tiger in an abandoned house: “…At first they were not afraid of it; rather they / fully expected that, wherever they went, extraordinary things would follow them, / and if that took the form of an emerald-eyed carnivore with a voice like a fault line, / then this was only different in degree and not in kind…” Included also are three elegant translations of poems by Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907), the first Italian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as (to use Yezzi’s heading) two “French Suites”: sustained dramatic monologues that bring an elegiac outlook to events of the speaker’s distant past, one in the voice of French composer Erik Satie, and the other in the voice of the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Either monologue alone could claim attention as the section’s centerpiece, but reading both together confirms a new expansion of Yezzi’s proficiency and vision.

In “Marina in Nervi,” Tsvetaeva addresses Irina, the daughter she placed in an orphanage during the Moscow famine in order to ensure she wouldn’t starve; tragically, the child died of neglect instead. Yezzi’s portrayal of Tsvetaeva as a mother forced to live with guilt and grief is braided with flashbacks to her own girlhood in Nervi, then an Italian spa where the poet’s tubercular mother was sent in hopes of a recovery. Tsvetaeva recalls watching the hotelier’s son at work on ornamental trompe-l’oeil painting:

From my window I would watch him on a scaffold
restoring faded stucco cornices
faux curtains blowing out of open shutters,
all make believe, ascribing depth to flatness
with his brush. That summer, I believe, I loved him,
just puppy love—though still I think of him.
He painted with considerable skill,
no writer, thank god. I loved him more for that.
Heaven has room for gifted artisans,
but poets, for their sins, are rarely saved.
So much the better, Mother liked to say.

Here, Yezzi’s talent for writing plain speech charged with music serves him well—variations in syntax and sentence length mirror that natural progression of “a fine mind thinking by itself”—while Yezzi the actor’s talent for empathy generates convincing content in the form of Tsvetaeva’s musings, such as her ironic skepticism of fellow poets. The setting Yezzi imagines for the displaced Russian poet is particularly poignant: displaced in Paris and still struggling with guilt, she escapes into happier times as if sharing confidences with the long-dead daughter who, in painful memory at least, remains alive.

If trompe-l’oeil is an art of visual trickery, in which two-dimensional images mimic real-world objects, Yezzi’s impersonations of historical characters provide an instructive poetic equivalent: they are utterly persuasive character portraits. “One Hundred Umbrellas,” which takes its title from some of the items Satie hoarded, depicts the innovative minimalist composer in the years after his break-up with Suzanne Valadon, acclaimed painter and artists’ model for the Impressionists; still devastated, he’s hired a young prostitute to wear Valadon’s discarded dress and treat him cruelly while he plies himself with absinthe—that is, unless his guest is entirely imaginary, one of the “green fairy”’s figments, a possibility raised but unresolved. Throughout the poem, Yezzi strikes exactly the right note: his Satie is charming, self-pitying, eccentric, and despairing, traits consistent with the composer’s failing health and alcoholism.

You’re wondering at these umbrellas, my dear?
I admit they look quite frightening at night.
I find them on my trips into the City.
Sad creatures, wind-wracked birds with broken pinions
lying in gutters or crashed onto the quay,
or under porticoes in the Marais.
A few still work. This one is cut bamboo.
Its slender bones expand to lift its wings
against the midday sun or cold spring rain,
like the one we have tonight that won’t let up.
After, you’ll take it as a souvenir.
I miss the City, but way leads on to way.
These wounded dinosaurs are my mementoes,
like a tune of 18 bars ad infinitum,
because extinction sounds like that,
played over just the same each time, forever.

Here, Yezzi’s vivid metaphors for the umbrellas—“wind-wracked birds with broken pinions,” “wounded dinosaurs”—lend energy and flair to Satie’s voice: the junk with which he surrounds himself seems almost to share his understated ennui, the composer’s acceptance (rightly or wrongly) of emotional defeat—a kind of “extinction” that, here at least, he connects to his own music. (Yezzi/Satie’s reference to “a tune of 18 bars ad infinitum” may refer to the composer’s Vexations, written after the break-up with Valadon, featuring a theme to be repeated 840 times—an obsessiveness consistent with a rejected lover’s anguish.)

Several of the new shorter poems connect music to fatherhood in fascinating ways. “On a Street Piano” charmingly depicts its speaker coaxing song from the keyboard while his embarrassed sons look on, self-conscious like all teenagers at a father’s public display. “Ex Machina” opens with (presumably) the same speaker listening to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited on his patio while waiting for one of his sons to return for a family commitment; expecting the boy to be late as usual, he catches sight of him, “as he streaks by on his bicycle, / …homing in the gloaming (and on time!)… / coasting / in air, armored with teenage sweep and pride / against contingency and pain. Thank god, / thank god, I pray to him, may it be so.” The father’s deep love finds moving expression in the poem’s skillful balance between fear of future misfortune and fervent prayer for the son’s protection. In “The True Vine,” which takes its title from a used record store in Baltimore, the speaker recalls his own father through an old Irish Rovers LP he runs across in the used vinyl bin— “Pure cheese, I thought / when I was a kid”—though now he hears in its “deeply hokey” tracks a “tenderness” that triggers a memory of his own father. In all three poems, music serves as an occasion for reflection, the trigger for expressing feelings unexamined under the pressures of daily routine but which emerge unexpectedly as urgent and deeply felt.

Taken as a whole, More Things in Heaven feels both expansive and too short—too short because we leave its pages reluctantly. It is a volume that invites us to enter a world that is varied and surprising, its characters (like those of Shakespeare’s dramatis personae) ranging from the humble to the high-born, its geographies reaching from wrecked homes and urban restaurants to Paris, the Azores, and the Flatirons of Colorado. David Yezzi isn’t the only poet able to channel the voices of characters real or invented, nor the only one able marshal a variety of prosodic effects to lend those voices richness and variety. He isn’t the only poet able to write convincingly of domestic life and everyday conflicts while uncovering the deeper fears that lurk beneath the surface. He isn’t the only poet able to enter history and speak in ways that sound authentic and emotionally resonant. Nor is he the only poet whose powers of real-life observation are matched by his powers of invention, his “fine mind” ranging widely—wondering, hoping—over a world both terrible and beautiful. He is, quite simply, that rare poet whose gifts in each of these areas have, through the years, increased steadily in scope and matured in equal measure—one whose taste, intelligence, skill, and empathy combine in ideal balance to produce some of the best poetry of his generation.