Still Poems

If you had cabinets juxtaposing human artifacts and natural wonders, as they often did in the Renaissance, what would they look like? "O cabinet/ of wonders: these// are not those," warns Meek (The Ecology of Elsewhere) of the "cabinets" in her latest collection, which is equal parts thought-provoking, language-drunk, and innately challenging. Divided into four cabinets, each containing a half-dozen "Still Lifes" ("with White," "with Caribbean Reef Squid"), the poems defy easy logic, leaping from line to line and image to image. In one, for instance, a phantom crane fly ("stilled wings/ the veined gauze of obsolescence") leads to disappearing images in a fitting-room mirror ("you let her go rather/ I made her gone"). It's worth it to take the time to see how dust settling from a shattered statue of Stalin relates to the forward propulsion of music, life never being static. VERDICT Absorbing reading for poetry pros.