The Enemies of Leisure, a collection drawn from a decade of writing,
wonders about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and
labor, invisibility and truth. Bound by Aristotle's comment, "Happiness
appears to depend on leisure," the book divides into four sections,
gathering poems concerned with sex and love, home and distances,
idleness and work, and uncertainty and death. Mixing traditional and
open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems' symmetry
depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense, as
they yoke the influences of Ashbery and Rich, Dorn and Wilbur, poets
otherwise as estranged from each other as waffles from lust, domestic
chores from Beauty and the Beast, ideas from hamburgers, and dying from
a train trip cross country.
There are "no things / without the ideas we call them by," proclaims the
book's opening poem, "American Ghost," inverting Williams's dictum not
to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of contemporary American
poetry so much as to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that
oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant
fading of experience. Making their bleak way forward toward the new
millennium from the barracuda under a tropical bay to "above the
abundant sand of the Sudan," these poems express the importance of being
"grateful for / those interruptions in the blink / of time we had,"
while cultivating "the grace to know what to ignore."
