IT IS AS IF DESIRE (from Hanging Loose Press), the latest book by (full disclosure) my best friend Terence Winch, is a collection of almost sonnets, ten-line poems written for occasions, like birthdays and anniversaries, with Winch's usual playful ease at manipulating formal guardrails and customary wit and wisdom within them, perhaps more subdued (less flashy) than earlier poetry collections (like last year's THAT SHIP HAS SAILED from U of Pittsburgh Press), but as with all Winch endeavors, that is deceptively challenged by the defiance at the heart of his lists of seemingly mundane daily realities, the defiance of a sensibility refusing to give in to the threats and calamities of twenty-first century life and the inevitable passage of the years of that life. As he writes in the poem "Cabbage & Jam" (note how allowing for the pause at the line breaks adds not only resonance to the seeming obvious meaning but multiple meanings):
Between word and meaning, the land
rolls down beyond the hidden arbor
where the clothesline waits in secret
where the cousins line up for the quiz
show and Lotto, where I sit by the phone
and computer expecting any minute
to hear from you, somewhere off
the grid, maybe sick, maybe blue,
how should I know? I just need for you
to call me, baby. Is that so hard to do?