Day for Night

Much of this book is a dense exhilarating ride through phantasmagoria illuminated by bright gleaming generalities: 'someone in the audience will wonder if that is how we are meant to survive our memories.' How are we to survive not only our memories but diminishment and nightmare? Many of the gods who preside here are movie makers from Jacques Tourneur to Takashi Miike. But startlingly these mysterious and eloquent poems culminate in the long next-to-last magnificent poem 'Son et Lumière.' Stevens now is the fecund model as Richard Deming modulates beautifully between four- and five- and even six-line stanzas. This is a tremendously accomplished fascinating book. -Frank Bidart