JIM DINE : A SONG AT TWILIGHT

“The people that I love, I love,” said Cecil Taylor. That goes for the named (for instance, Diana, Ted, Bob, Claude, Mandelstam, Barbara, Ernie, Ron and others) and the unnamed in these intimate, intense, fractured elegies. Reading the poems, we might think we know these people. There are the stunning longer poems, “Jewish Fate” and “My Letter to the Troops,” each figuring like a playlet, particular players performing their way from past and present time toward a horizon line—“We live forever/On a minute.” Dine’s sense of measure (echoing Creeley here?) provides the tension between experiencing exuberance and the darker tones of grief. There’s painting in this book. Colors become words naming colors: blue, silver, white, grey, orange, black, yellow. Red goes with bolt cutters, a shawl, risotto, brain, smudges, coat, stars, ears, leaves, a shell, an axe, dreams. Loads of dreams in the poems. And places in this journey of the soul, for instance Ohio, Manhattan, Vienna, Rome and Pa