Venice

The ruminative sixth collection from Mlinko (Distant Mandate) opens on an epigraph from The American Scene by Henry James, yet Europe haunts these pages through myth, music, and art. Standing before a Roman sculpture, the poet reflects on a soprano's technique, "It was the fountains that helped me remember/ a spinto's stratagem/ of holding her breath for at least four minutes,/ training herself to dive in,/ then, if not divadom." In a quiet square, "The windswept expanse/ is both style and semantics." In Mlinko's highly metrical lines, rhyme contributes to ornate imagery, puns, and parenthetical asides (which occasionally seem to serve to extend the length of a line). The effect is dazzling, but at times such sprezzatura stretches the limits of sense. In a villa in Herculaneum, the poet asks, "Who was I there? A guest, a voyeur, a vagabond." The last word seems unlikely, until the reader notes that the line preceding ends with "a lost beau monde," which dictates the ensuing rhyme. Still, Mlinko offers readers a catalog of sonorous pleasures in this capacious book. (Apr.)