A Protocol for Touch

Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories to oppose ''the tyranny of names'' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter its ''protocols of touch''--tender and austere formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics sufficiently rich nuanced and various to express maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity or mastery of form so equal to passion''s contradictory occasions. Merritt''s prosodic range is prodigious--she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here in her words the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: The heart''s insistent undersong: how live?/how live? How live? this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that.--Eleanor WilnerBetween us how we wrestle over words Strain to wring some blessing from the silence Deliverance from violence its fear its lure The tyranny of names: night day Sable and alabaster flint shale Steel and lace. Who among us can afford To speak the language--any language--rightly? As if it weren''t enough to bear one heart Eternally divided in its chambers? We stand close enough to touch. We do Not touch. Between us burns a sword of fire A rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.