An American Unconscious

Mebane Roberston's verse has only gone deeper since Signal from Draco (2007). These are poems rich in imbedded information, tracing thought and emotion through the entire bric-a-brac of experience. There are bouts of lyric clarity and sudden plunges through cogitating thickets. Mebane's layered soliloquies refuse to broker an expedient deal with daily living and the nightcrawl to come up with something reassuringly tidy. If Berryman was here, and he could mosh, he might say these lines. An American Unconscious reports on our shared dysfunctional urban pastoral of "brittle days, nervous nights." The poems have both the swift trajectory and the tactile depth of paintings, as in "Kandinsky in Love": "This blue verse is immersed in the clear serum she used to use / To make her black hair give off a radiant sheen." Reader, there aren't many poets about whom you can honestly say that no one else has ever written lines like these. Here is a true one. And he already knows you, the way you thought only you know yourself.