The eagerly anticipated second collection by poet and esteemed critic Stephen Burt "Flaunting your useless knowledge has failed you again, Though it was all they had taught you." --from "Like a Wreck" Consult any childhood development guide and you'll find the term "parallel play": when children under two are placed together, they'll play separately but won't interact. They are more fascinated with their immediate surroundings than with each other. Stephen Burt's second collection of poems, "Parallel Play," describes lovers, friends, travelers, and revelers attempting lives dependent on each other but still pulled inevitably into preoccupations of their own self-awareness. When there are many obstacles--overeducation, narcissism, extended adolescence, nomadic existence--how can Americans crawl out of the nursery and coexist if they increasingly have to learn to do so as adults?

"This second collection is harder and terser than Burt's first collection, Popular Music (1999), and its pointed use of traditional forms gives them a spiky significance: that the choices we're given are limited, and crucial: 'Win or lose,/ Such small decisions, run together, fuse/ In concentration nothing like the ease/ We seem to see in the skills you use,/ Till someone wins. Then someone else will lose.' Again and again in these 50-plus lyrics, in everything from 'Pierre Bonnard: Standing Nude' to 'Scenes from Next Week's Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' Burt finds beauty hemmed in on every side, with a fate that is never completely self-determined, and that poses 'questions that arrange us for our roles/ In plots on TV shows, on the narrow channels/ Nobody would choose.' Burt is the author of the critical study Randall Jarrell and His Age and has written for the New York Times, TLS and PW, and other journals. Operating on a more macro level, his sestina 'Our History' repeats the words 'evildoers,' 'country,' 'history,' 'poor,' 'being' and 'government'; its juxtaposition of banal discourse with real problems feels liberating, even as it ends 'I too would like to be rid of the evildoers,/ but for now this country likes its government./ What will the poor nations say, when they write our history?' The poem requires its repetitions to sound out full force, but it is what liberal democracy sounds like." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"In developmental psychology, the term 'parallel play' describes how very young children will play next to each other yet not together. It's an apt title for Stephen Burt's second collection of poems: Many of his subjects seem to know that they belong to a community but feel utterly separate within it.

Burt's poems display an interest in the individual psyche, particularly in young adulthood... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) (in 'July Night,' the speaker laments: 'Is to be adult to be always/ disappointed, or to feign/ satisfaction with what is?') as well as an urge to inhabit the minds of others. In 'Self-Portrait as Kitty Pryde,' he writes:

I have been identified

as gifted & dangerous. People fight over me

but not in the ways I want. Who would expect

it in a girl from Deerfield, Illinois,

town of strict zoning, no neon & quality schools?

One of the recurring surprises in 'Parallel Play' is the breadth of Burt's fascination with contemporary culture (Kitty Pryde is a heroine from the X-Men comic books). A poem written from the perspective of Pierre Bonnard's 'Standing Nude' sits next to a villanelle for WNBA player Lindsay Whalen; another explores 'Scenes from Next Week's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."' One gleans an earnest desire to make poems out of the flotsam and jetsam of American life.The intent is to sensitize readers to the overlooked aspects of contemporary life. These intentions are felt as well in the collection's suite of political poems, which includes a moving elegy to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone as well as a sestina that laments: 'It's an old problem: how do we go on being/ so comfortable, and so troubled? Are we poor/ losers? Am I one of the evildoers?'

The true delight of the book, though, is 'Six Kinds of Noodles,' an irresistible sestina that meditates on the work of John Ashbery and the function of contemporary poetry in the backdrop of an Asian noodle shop. After considering the dizzying array of menu options, the poet-speaker longs for a simple satisfying meal:

And yet the life

we long for in all its disorder is not a life

of so many tastes, nor of fame; more like one good book,

and ginger with which to enjoy it.

Jennifer Grotz is the author of 'Cusp.'" Reviewed by Jennifer Grotz, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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