“woozy, reckless through the barricades”

The other day in the comments, Jessie Carty said “I love a good chapbook.”

Lately, I’ve come into possession of a number of good chapbooks from a variety of publishers, and I hope to bring them to your attention here in the weeks before Christmas, with the reminder that chapbooks, which usually sell for around $10, make great stocking stuffers.

First up is Marilyn L. Taylor’s Going Wrong, from the Parallel Press chapbook series. Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. The chapbook is saddle-stapled with cardstock covers with three-color cover art on nice cream-colored paper. It’s fat for a chapbook, offering 37 pages of poetry. It sells for $10.

Marilyn L. Taylor is poet laureate of Wisconsin. Marilyn is a master of formal verse who delights in the satiric mode. I think it was Robert Graves who said that poetry has two modes, the lyric and the satiric. Going Wrong manages to combine the two in personna poems in the voices of women who have, in fact, gone wrong. In love, of course. That’s what makes a lyric.

For the most part, Going Wrong is what you might call a lighter look at love. As, for example, the “Valentine for a Bashful Boy”

Lovely man, my shaggy puppy,
Why the frown? The visage droopy?
Does the lack of making whoopee
Make you feel all misanthropy?

It’s fair to call these verses comic but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re light. Well, the Valentine is pretty light, but others, like “I Miss You and I’m Drunk” reveal Taylor’s startling mastery of image:

Look at the way the moon just sits there
with its brights on, aiming
that yellowish beam across the water
at the lovers and the skinnydippers

and how the summer sawgrass
grabs me by the ankles, making me
stumble, making me think about
the flaming ache of falling down on top of you

Not every poem in Going Wrong is satiric. Some, like “To the Mother of a Dead Marine” and “In Other News,” take a daring look at the violent dark side of eroticism. What the poems never are is confessional free verse. They are all about language and its possibilities.

The chapbook is a catalogue of forms, some of which I probably am not sophisticated enough to recognize. Sonnets abound, and there’s a ballad and a villanelle, terza rima, and plain vanilla rhymed couplets. The chapbooks tour de force is a crown of sonnets called “The Seven Very Liberal Arts.” Those arts are Logic, Grammar, Music, Rhetoric, Geology, Arithmetic, and Astronomy. The crown has a poem for each art, each poem plays exquisitely with the language of the art in question. Here are a few lines from the sestet of “Grammar:”

Scribble suggestions slowly down my spine
with your intense, exploratory care,
and punctuate, with sharp intakes of air
the way my staves and strophes intertwine.

Here is a chapbook of poems for a wide audience. Those who say they don’t read poetry because it is difficult will find these poems very accessible and entertaining. Those who prefer texture and nuance will find it in abundance in Taylor’s language play and mastery of craft.