Linda gregerson, the poet’s poet, publishes New Poems
Denise Low Canopy: Poems, by Linda Gregerson Ecco, 2022. Linda Gregerson’s writing explores the limits of syntax. Her poems are not prose-poems, but they take poetry up to the exact border between stanzaic verse and prose paragraphs. Meters shift the balance as her fulsome lines fall into rhythms. Her diction is rich, never simple exposition. She is a poet’s poet. Amongst the considerable volume of published verse, Canopy stands out as a workshop in the possibilities for the genre. Canopy’s content is informed by history as well as echoes of historic poetic forms, like regular stanza patterns. These Gregerson refits to construct her own vision, to good effect. As critic Daniel Chiasson writes, “Her poems hack their verbal energy from deep sources in Renaissance poetry and its classical models.” The lyrical tradition is apparent, if greatly modified. In previous collections Gregerson has used her original tercet form of long-short-long lines. Canopy reprises that form in “Horse in a Gas Mask,” which begins: “Browband cheekpiece throatlatch / bit. / Plus all the links and leathers for holding.” Five spaces between words in the first line take the place of standard punctuation—a contemporary substitution and not unique to Gregerson. The poet does invent a new way to accentuate the off-balance effect of three lines by use of a short,