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Review title: No denying skill, but still freeze-dried
Product review: It says a lot about contemporary poetry when a prize-winning collection's frame of reference is 40s and 50's jazz music -- a form not popular since, well, the 1950s. The Singer book skillfully drops all the requisite jazzbo references, which must make people like W.S. Merwin, the Yale Series judge, ache for his youth or at least feel hep for the hour. But how long can poetry crutch on such shop-worn referentiality? Certainly not long enough to earn poetry a general and appreciative audience. My quibble here isn't with the skill -- that's all there. It reminds me of the question the late poet William Matthews, also a jazz fan, once posed to a lecture audience: "What did posterity do for us lately?" In the case of this book, not much, I'm afraid. Just seems freeze-dried.
