New York

Poetry. "The Great Pavement" and "The Ulterior Parkways," the two long poems that make up Michael Gottlieb's NEW YORK, each consist of sixty brief sections that are by turns elegant, direct, gritty, oblique. They offer the reader a completely refreshed sense and sensibility. Like an extended "exercize" in tonal breath control, the familiar sights and sounds and aspirations of city life pass through the author's prose, refracted in the light of his prismatic feeling for the cultivated languages, informational hums, whines and clatters of urban life. Beneath the cosmetic verities of the quotidian, Gottlieb assays the shadows of ambition, the underpainting of memory, the bone structure of history, the masks of humor. What emerges is a generalized portrait of a particular place, as much talk as take, as much savvy as cool, a cartographic thrust and parry rhythm flush with stories, wised-up with experience. As grainy as the dots of a tabloid photo, the sentences in Gottlieb's NEW YORK make attention specific. They give us back a place we only thought we knew.