Helpless, Helpless . . .

A love letter to love as only August Kleinzahler could write it

August Kleinzahler's Helpless, Helpless . . . begins with the image of a hawk, "a pure wild heartless thing, / beautiful and horrible, nothing in between," solitary until a second hawk joins the first, the two of them wheeling and diving, "enraptured by all they were, were able to do, / not as separate beings, but as two." This, it turns out, is the book's essential motion: from lyric isolation to the difficult, exhilarating fact of another person. Gathered from five decades of work, these thirty-eight poems, arranged not by year but by the interior logic of desire and tenderness, constitute the love poems of a major American poet.

Kleinzahler does not write love poetry the way it usually gets written. The seductions here are conducted at Chinese restaurants, in the backseat of ruined DeSotos, by monkeys halfway up coconut trees. He answers the ancient question--How do I love thee?--by way of a Kwakiutl raiding party descending on Ocean Beach. As Daisy Fried writes in her foreword, "Among Kleinzahler's best tricks are his deft, vertiginous layering of past and present, and his purposeful blending of reality and invention"--and when he "delivers a parody of emotion, he is always also, simultaneously, delivering the emotion itself."

What surprises most in Helpless, Helpless . . . is the tonal range: the mercurial comedy shares space with spare elegy, with poems of morning light and dissolving memory, with the shapes that absence makes against the sky. As Fried writes, the book "feels like a love letter, not only to beloveds, but also to the human ability to love--to withstand love--variously, terribly, ineptly, wonderfully--at a moment when the world might need a reminder."