Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar

By Richard Meier Description Reviews The poems in Meier’s second collection stumble toward a gesture like Shelley’s to Jane Williams: guitar given in place of song.These poems posit a transmutation of clarity: “The sentences were so clear you had to run into them / and discover your head in the sliding glass door / of the house on stilts.” The whole a love poem to that blow or barrier. “A note in the form of a kiss passed / through the barricades.” Spectacularly inventive in its phrasings, unabashedly traditional in its themes and fluidly postmodern in its syntax, Meier’s second volume is also almost unremittingly sad. The title invokes Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem on the gift of a musical instrument, whose strains, Shelley says, transfigure both joy and pain. Drenched in the language of poets who have come before him, Meier’s landscapes frame and expose a music of corroded memory and intense regret. Publishers Weekly, Starred ReviewIn the midst of all the conceptual fun a