American Music by Chris Martin, Copper Canyon Press, 2007 $15.00

By Joan Biddle

I was at first put off by Chris Martin’s overwrought eros: “Electrified, my sword bending like / A cactus, the ruthless wind / Upon it, I thought it terribly // important to bed / A woman of learning.” But by the end of American Music I was endeared to his frank, subtle stream of consciousness about the city he lives in and seems to love, New York. This book is New York if you have time to hang around in it, be in it, annexed in the outside air. Martin personifies the city as a desirous being, sometimes causing his own desire, sometimes embodying it, sometimes frustrating it.

The Manhattan references resonate, and Martin does not explain too much to the reader: “the men erecting / Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates, one of them / Ravenously downing a hot // Sausage.” He lets happenings flow in and out of a warm stream of language, in triplet stanzas that bounce through the mind. His line breaks are unexpected, simple and refreshing. Martin has exuberance for life and language, enthusiasm for whatever this city offers him. He doesn’t challenge too much, or leave you aching. But his honesty draws you in.

Martin is good at capturing the atmosphere around him in a few short words: “the purloined sandwich / In my bag, a thing // That pleases / Me greatly, as does the birthmark / On the bridge of the nose // Of the girl in the deli / Buying a Diet Pepsi.” Though throughout the book, he plagiarizes (a word he uses) other writers and musicians, placing their words in italics. Their words are seamed with his almost unnoticeably, and they are arguably unnecessary.

His are poems of place, and this he is expert in painting, even the places he has left: “a church / In California that I hold / In my head and its thick-tongued // Towers toll without / My being there.”

As specific as he is (“I have / A trophy from coaching a girls’ basketball // Team and it pleases me”) he is not specific about his inner world. Sometimes the poems are too much a rapturous collage of surface information and the words of others and not enough of what comes from him, or a tying together into a coherent picture. The poems are free explorations, yet, as in “Being-in-the-Being,” he writes, “It is exhausting to be free.”

JOAN BIDDLE is a writer and editor living in Memphis, Tennessee. She earned an MA in Writing from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and an MFA in Writing from The New School in New York. Joan recently moved back to her hometown of Memphis, where she lives with her husband Jacob and her cat Dopey.