Today's letter to you concerns Baron Wormser's new poetry collection, Impenitent Notes. But before I say anything about this book, I need to explain that I am far from being a disinterested reviewer. Not only is Baron a dear friend, a colleague, and a mentor; not only do we share a publisher; not only have I listened to numbers of these poems at readings; but I was, in fact, hired by CavanKerry Press to copyedit the manuscript before it was designed and typeset. Thus, despite my lack of objectivity, I may know this collection better than any other reader does, or will.

Copyediting is a strange business. One has no say about the big picture: a collection's overarching themes, the structural or imagistic foundations of the poems, decisions about the relative strength of the pieces in a manuscript. Rather, the copyeditor concentrates on the details: the placement of an apostrophe, the italicizing of a phrase, the spelling of a name, the indentation of a line, the spacing of a dash. She spends much time weighing the value of a semicolon versus a period. She considers pronouns and their antecedents. In a way, a copyeditor's job is analogous to a hospital attendant's, that minimum-wage factotum who changes a patient's sheets and empties the bedpans. The worker may not have much decision-making power, but he ponders the accruing details that higher-ups don't have time or occasion to notice.

As a writer, I care intensely about grammar, punctuation, and syntax as tools of exploration. As a copyeditor, I am hired to impose stylistic consistency on an author's grammar, punctuation, and syntax. No matter how you look at it, you can see that I take the placement of a comma to heart. Yet this is not the case among most writers, whether they be poets or prose writers. I know this because I empty the bedpans. It is the case, however, with Baron. I think I might have suggested three corrections in his manuscript. Nearly every line, nearly every spelling, nearly every dash and semicolon and comma was pitch-perfect.

Pitch is an important word here, for punctuation is a poem's sound control; and sloppy punctuation often indicates that a poet is not paying attention to whether or not a line should pause, or sigh, or lift its voice, or stop dead in its tracks. Here's an example of Baron's punctuational skill, in the opening stanza of the poem "My Son Has a Persistent Qualitative Motor Disorder":

Oh, she was the mother of that catastrophe:

Her child a spindly hurricane, misshapen boat,

A broken spark of resolute energy

Yet a body named in Christian charity,

Yet the call of her cells, her own hard notes.

The stanza is beautiful, musical, lilting . . . but what I notice most is where Baron did not add a comma: there is no punctuation after "energy" in line 3. Instead, he allows the harshness of that line ending--"energy" / "yet"--to interrupt his phrasal elegance. The absence of a comma is notable here because he does choose to use one in his subsequent repetition of the "yet" phrase. To me this tiny technical decision has considerable consequence--not least in the way in which I begin to parse the poem's ambiguities of love and ruin.

I could go on and on here about Baron's precision, but, really, what makes his work strong is not simply that he knows how to handle a comma. Robert Frost once noted that "a poem should be a set of sentences"--an unromantic remark that nonetheless speaks directly to the power of great poetry. If you examine the work of Shakespeare, or Milton, or Shelley, or Dickinson, or Plath: if you follow a poet's grammar and syntax down the page, if you study punctuation's role in a poem's metrical hesitations and impatience, you can see that the poet is pressing his or her way into the sentence; that the writer is using the sentence as a means of intellectual, emotional, or physical discovery. Every element of the sentence must be weighed and considered in relation to the others. The poet struggles with the pieces, discards them, reorganizes them but, in the end, like a stonemason, manages to construct a wall that stands and withstands.

I'm writing this review as a copyeditor, as a person whose field of vision persistently narrows to the small. Other kinds of readers, other kinds of poets, will judge Baron's book far more comprehensively than I have. Nonetheless, I believe that a poem's details matter; I believe in the difficult art of the sentence. For me, it was both an honor and a lesson to copyedit Baron's work; and I hope he won't mind if I quote a poem in its entirety so that you, too, can follow his sentences and half-sentences down the page and come to your own conclusions about their persistent, unnerving clarity.

Evenings

Baron Wormser

The sort of man always announcing plans,

Then plodding off to take a nap.

"There's worse," his wife once said without

Sullenness, as if love lay in avoidance.

Futility rises as well as anyone in the morning.

It's evenings that are brown, restless hells,

That crumble like plaster and faint like ghosts.

I see him in his tee shirt on the porch next

To our porch, a glass of ice water in his hand.

Moths swarm the yellow bulb above his head.

The TV chuckles inside. He asks me how I am

And starts talking about how much jack he could

Have made if only he'd gotten a chance.

I listen awhile, then excuse myself. He wags

A finger and asks if I'm too good for him.

I start to speak but already he's turned away.

[from Impenitent Notes (CavanKerry Press, 2010)]