Diverging Visions
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           The titles of some of her volumes (Causeway, Prospect/ Refuge, and now Site Specific) hint at how she often uses landscape to explore personal themes: a causeway is a narrow strip of land that forms a bridge between two things (or, by implication, between people), and a site-specific work of art is a piece created for a specific place and time (again, a neat little metaphor for poetry and art in general). Her poems often proceed innocently enough, then take an unexpected turn, as in “All Night the Screen Door Slept,” which ends: “Who bothers/ locking a door one can see through?/ The past and its lies.” Here, the abrupt turn reveals that there’s a great deal more hidden within the house than would at first appear.

            Similarly, a poem that seems innocuous initially, “Building a Nest,” which on the surface is about a woman assembling a dress pattern, ends with the line: “your lips pursed like my mother’s, full of pins.” That ending phrase appears to indicate a less-than-ideal relationship between the poet and her mother. Sexton seems to have reached the peak of her powers from the poems in Causeway (2008) to the present. She can be witty, funny, and profound, as in her poem “Turnstile,” which finds a shared grief even in reflecting upon a common gateway: “I carry the prints of a hundred thousand/ strangers in my hands.”

            If Elaine Sexton’s work is understated and circumspect with respect to personal revelation, the poems in Liza Flum’s Hover are the polar opposite. Indeed, they announce and summarize their subject matter even in their titles, such as “Cradle song for a frozen embryo” and “Portrait of the chosen family with lines from a living will, a hospital visitation authorization, and a health care proxy,” to name just two.

            Themes of the book could hardly be more explicitly au courant, ranging from polyamory to marriage equality to in vitro fertilization. Yet, while they are smart and consciously crafted, Flum’s lines can sometimes seem a bit graceless or even crass: “we are trying for a baby by injecting your ass with hormones.”

            To be fair, Flum is playing an entirely different poetic game from Sexton, and Flum’s best poems have an unmistakable power. In a passage from the poem “Memorial to a marriage,” Flum writes persuasively: “Didn’t Whitman say queers should stand on the shoreline calling, ‘I was, I am’ to journeyers from the future, as they sail past us in paper boats? I will: I do.”

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Dale Boyer is the author of Columbus in the New World.