FORGIVE US OUR HAPPINESS

paper 0-87451-919-5 Ellen Bryant Voigt picked this debut volume for a prize sponsored by the legendary Bread Loaf Writers— Conference, and in many ways it’s a compendium of the styles and themes common among first-time poets these days, from the goofy exhilaration in its title to the aesthetic implied in lines from —The Taste of Wild Cherry—: —I—m writing / the scene as it happens, seeking / from light and shadow the permanence of stone.— Simic’s surreal self-indulgence, Wright’s wimpy transcendence, Strand’s coy abstractions: Forhan has sampled from these and other moderns in verse that also pays obligatory homage to Whitman and Ginsberg with self-described —howls— and —yawps.— The poet’s sometimes startling diction and imagery disguise the emptiness and nothingness he celebrates in poem after poem—as in the somewhat contrarian —An Honest Forest,— which describes a place where —nothing happens— and there’s little —to witness.— Forhan sometimes resorts to childlike rhythms in poems that read like fractured fairy tales (—Cracking Open,— —Ginger Cake—), and he’s often giddy with life’s little astonishments, as in the banal title poem, with its lame insight, —There’s always something.— A surprisingly sharp elegy for his father, in which the poet sees himself in the old man, stands out from all the bliss-seeking whimsy and the many lazy poems that pad the volume. Like so many contemporary poets, Forhan distrusts language itself and —the fetid stench— of words, so you have to wonder why he bothers at all, or whether he’s really taken full measure of all his poetic assertions.