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Daze by Matthew Cooperman

The book that you are reading,” announces one of the first poems in Matthew Cooperman’s new collection DaZE, “is a building with eyes”—and how it stares. From directly addressing the reader, to meditatively observing as a spider picks its way over the detritus in a bathroom sink (“a blind man whirling/amberite canes”), to pointing out that “From space we gather a sense of immensity/but no one’s seen it,” these poems play through vision’s possibilities and limitations. Of course, what you can see depends on where you stand, so they also explore problems of location, time and perspective, with pieces like “Seen and Felt Watching” and “From the Corner of My” particularly riffing on those notions. In the sequence called “Channel Town,” material reappears from poem to poem, transformed each time, but carrying its past with it into each new present; part collage, part recurring dream, part recycling program, the technique weaves the text around and through itself freely, without confinement.

However, DaZE’s most insistent concern is its days: the daily news, the daily grind, the details of war and weird science that enter our lives on a daily basis. Remember the human ear grown out of a mouse’s back? It’s in here. Bill O’Reilly, pyramid schemes, Los Angeles seen in an appropriately cinematic aerial pan-in, the Balkan War, the war in Iraq, debates about the eventual fate of the universe and the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide all make appearances—but so do Galileo, Ajax, Susan Howe, Ed Dorn and Anton Chekhov. The book’s most recurrent images—stones, dawn, wells, the desert, gardening, stars—mark both time and timelessness, the paradox we live in day to day.

DaZE never loses touch with the fact that at the centers of our throwaway news items is, after all, us. One of two poems titled “Day’s News” offers, after a vertigo-inducing sally through headlines and lead stories, a moment with the paperboy who brings them: “Old canvas bags with the smell of winter, iced handlebars, throbbing elbows, of this I do remember.” In “It Is Absence We Cultivate Knowing the Corpse,” which wrestles with the habits that arise from our suffusion in news and ad copy, the poem suddenly offers an arresting portrait: “I think of him as an envelope steamed open by war.”

The collection’s progress is studded by short lyrics titled with months’ names, not always in order, suggesting the passage of years. A series of series overlain on one another, the book asks, under what conditions, and in what ways does history repeat itself? Personal history, national history, natural history; how does the secondhand experience we get from the media serve our memories? Often the confluence produces humor as well as beautiful, insightful language—“Day’s Flavas,” which springboards off Mattel’s 2003 redesign of Barbie, is not to be missed. Ultimately, DaZE stages an inviting, incisive call-and-response with its world, our world, the dues we pay, our dealings, our daze, our days.

Poet Matthew Cooper reads his work at Hallwalls at the Church on Thursday, March 8. 7:30pm (341 Delaware Ave., 854-1694/www.hallwalls.org). He is brought to Buffalo by UB Poetics Plus.