The poetry-business critics have many, many beefs; and chief among them is the crime known as "reviewing your friends' books." When I first learned that this practice was a crime, I was taken aback. I mean, I don't read that many books of contemporary poetry by people who aren't my friends, and I don't have that many poet friends, so naturally the number of books I end up reading is scant, and almost all are selected by affection.

But I see the critics' point. In a public forum, dispassion has a chance at least of disguising itself as objectivity, which is why I write relatively few journal reviews. Of course, I don't want people to assume that I am a brown-nosing networker striving to review my way to the top . . . though, as I sit here in my bathrobe in Brigadoon, the idea that anyone would mistake me for Slavering Poetry Bitch is rather amusing. But this blog is my own private venue, where I can feel justified in talking about any book I please. So today I am going to talk about Jeanne Marie Beaumont's new collection Burning of the Three Fires.

I first met Jeannie through the mail. When Deerbrook Editions accepted Boy Land for publication, I discovered that I would need to ask poets to write cover blurbs. This was distressing because I only knew one poet, Baron Wormser; and since he had metaphorically held my hand through the composition of the entire book, he was clearly not the person who should be writing a blurb. So Baron kindly asked several acquaintances if they would be interested in reading the manuscript, and among them was Jeannie.

Today Jeannie directs the Advanced Poetry Seminar at the Frost Place, and occasionally we meet in New York City, where she lives: once to read together, but once to walk around among Richard Serra sculptures at MOMA and once to eat beet salad at the boathouse restaurant in Central Park. In short, since our blurb introduction, we've managed to maintain an interest in one another both as writers and as human beings.

But sometimes I wonder why she is so kind about my work because hers is, on the surface anyway, so extremely different from mine. This is what I said in a 2005 review of her second collection, Curious Conduct (published in the Colorado Review before I knew it was wrong to write about friends' work):

Her words fill the mouth like diamonds, sharp-edged and inedible; and what to do with them once you've swallowed is part of their mystery: the language treads deer-paths that circle and tease, and frequently dead-end in secrecy. Mystery is a given, the action of her poems often unexplainable; yet as events and images accrue one upon the next, they gradually attach themselves to wider secrets of creation.

Likewise, in Burning of Three Fires, the words on the page work as a sort of potion: "swallow this sound, this image," these poems seem to say, "and something strange will happen." Since I don't write at all like this, I'm fascinated. The poet's inner eye is drawn to an item--a 1963 dressing table, or a Viennese dollhouse, or a chair in the Neue Galerie --and suddenly that item becomes its own imagined universe, a way "to dream of a self / detained in an extravagance / that has no earthly use / for us."

In other words, when I think of Jeannie's writing, I think of precise, visceral detail overlaying a kind of fairy-tale mystery. So when, last week, she sent me a letter about my own new collection, How the Crimes Happened, and she said, "I . . . noted several interesting vector points between our two collections," I was nonplussed, to say the least. But, you know: I think, in fact, she's right. And one of those vectors is narrative. Both of us are experimenting with line as a way to control narrative direction and the emotional rise and fall of action and experience. We aren't telling the same stories necessarily, and the sounds of our lines are very different, but we are pressing those lines into specific narrative service. I hope she won't mind, then, if I quote a poem in full as an example of what's she's doing with her lines. (Please imagine that every line beginning with "You" is tabbed. For whatever reason, stupid Blogger won't allow me to format the poem correctly.)

Going by Taxi

Jeanne Marie Beaumont

I wear gloves to my elbows; you wear herringbone trousers.

It starts to snow; the streetlights haven't switched on yet.

I lack ordinary patience; where's the towne crier?

You say correction; I say retraction.

The citrus look exacting; they make calm orange pyramids.

Let me buy alstroemeria; you choose the beer.

Wood bundles whiten near the awning; remember our fireplace?

Life takes things away from you; the snow gives way to sleet.

You say umbrella; I say imbroglio.

Tuesday's best for sleuthing; we pursue the stubborn missing.

When I'm needy, I'm rude; keep an eye down the avenue.

We don't want to let that taxi go by; we don't.

All this time yields no evidence; all this time gives no clue.

You say angry; I say ennui.

Let's kiss when the meter starts; ah, here come the lights.

I've forgotten the address; you've got a claim check in your pocket.

We stocked our coat closet with wood; it was ten, eleven years ago.

Bugs crept out under the door; carried far from earthy homes.

You say step on it; I say no stop.

We don't know the tune on the radio, and the street's turned black with snow.

To me, this poem reads like a retelling of the jazz standard "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off": I can hear Billie Holiday's dense, melancholy voice behind these lines, her tone of humorous, tragic resignation. I have no idea whether or not that's the voice that Jeannie heard too. But I love the way in which the poet invests herself in that semicolon, the way in which the punctuation mark becomes both the link and the division between the characters. Maybe our common infatuation with punctuation is another "interesting vector point" in our writing styles. Certainly I recognize her love for word accidents: puns as glory and tragedy. As my friend Will points out, I have a weakness for typos, and I bet Jeannie does too, both as words themselves and as living, twitching evidence of error, serendipitous or otherwise. In any case, it's been exciting for me to discover these poems, and to think about Jeannie sitting at her desk in New York City, puzzling them out. It's exciting for me to know a poet who thinks so hard about what her mind sees.