In the Margins / Al margen

Robert Kramer is a poet of perception and reflection; he observes, he thinks and feels. He makes us notice the margin of our lives, redeems the drabness of the daily, makes the trivial significant, the forgettable unforgettable. Enhancing Kramer's nuanced moods and descriptions is a remarkable precision of imagery. The new boy in the neighborhood "slouches and scuffs the black-tarred street / with his ragged canvas sneakers." Especially memorable are the lines at the end of a poem. A sudden childhood memory?startles, like the echo of a cough in an empty cathedral. His father remembers the frozen pondwhere girls and boys in brightest sweaterswould skate and sport on the ragged ice, avoiding the driftwood that protruded from the surface, like the clawing hands of drowned hoboes. And in a woman's fantasy A leering sailor in a red-striped under-blouse,tight white bell-bottomed trouserswanders through her Parisian dream and nightmares, a red pompom bobbing on his jaunty slanted cap. Following these impressions are vignettes of writers and artists of the past, evoked with Kramer's subtle and meaningful precision. And to round things out, he offers a series of short poems patterned on Chinese poets of another age, treasured moments of joy and fantasy and grief. Kramer's world is simultaneously tiny and vast. He invites us to partake of it. If we do, we will be the richer for it. Clifford Browder