Michael Robins, In Memory of Brilliance & Value

Most Likely to Secede
I am a room full of people. I am a roomfacing people forward. What I’ve done
keeps me filled & I build myself takingtheir heads. I wasn’t hoping for a whorl,
rended for the era was one of undoing.My people burned. My hospital burned
& burned. Birds went thump in the rayslike a stillborn crown, mainly baggage
where more burned inside the window.Heat of so much clapping sang blisters
on my skin. I am a room full of peoplewho confess every millionth minor bird
& burn each one. Other, smaller birdswere birds left burning with their cribs.
I’m intrigued by the musicality of the couplets in Chicago poet Michael Robins’latest collection, the elegy-esque In Memory of Brilliance & Value (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2015). In Memory of Brilliance & Value is Robins’ third full-length poetry collection after The Next Settlement (University of North Texas Press, 2007) and Ladies & Gentlemen (Saturnalia Books, 2011). Set in five numbered sections, each of which include a dozen or so poems, each poem is constructed in short, curt couplets reminiscent slightly of the work of Toronto poet Marcus McCann for its condensed, sharp turns. Robins’ language-play is far less overt than in McCann’s poetry, but the cadence retains a lovely bounce and patter, patterning across a ridgeway of delightful sound. As he writes in “Poem for Degrees & Resistance”: “Some bother, some relax & lying back / welcome the bell of the buckled deck // as though no stony warning can scorch / our hips. Over love the iceberg turns, // mistakes standing if the fellow stands / to leap as the poet before him.”
Robins’ precise and meditative poems are tightly-packed, and occasionally tightly-wound. Through a series of anecdotes, observations and queries dressed in lyric couplets, his poems display a fine tension of articulating a low-level anxiety via a deceptive calm.




Outside the Pay-Per-View Museum
Water was pleading for it, flutteredsheets wrestled in the foam & roar.
Not a herd, it’s the string of buffalowho once grazed coolly. Who wasn’t
bewildered by wagons bravely rolled,fanning the wilds toward a baldness.
No bray of a biplane either, neithersmoke, nor a family who isn’t yours.
Hearsay dwindles by cannon & pinchto precipitation. Cloudsped, equally
fast the horses producing the plains.They were wheeling, then a caravan
poured forth these children. They’reinching over the hills with grubbing,
boasting wet in a landscape portrait.It was shot-for-shot. It was sensation.