THE GOAT SONGS

Najarian considers the past in this debut collection of poems.

History—recent and remote—is omnipresent in this Vassar Miller Prize-winning volume of poems. In the first section, “Armenia, PA,” the poet describes his childhood growing up in an Armenian family in Pennsylvania Dutch country—of visiting the cemetery where several of his relatives are buried, he quips, “We’re / the only Armenians in town, / as usual” (“Family Visit”). The landscape, with its centuries of use and disuse, habitation and vacancy, provides numerous small moments to contemplate the passage of time, as where the poet describes walking an abandoned railroad: “So skirt a black wall, / follow the shallow creek, and head for the woods— // where no trains have ventured since forty-eight, / and where, under leaves, / anthracite cinders yield fragments of light” (“Taking the Train From Kempton, PA”). The second section, “Kleptomania,” celebrates all things sensuous: bodies, flowers, foreign lands, anything that can be sampled or stolen but never really owned. In “The Hands of an Ex-Lover,” Najarian writes, “I no longer lay claim to them. / I remember hands cool and white, / clumsy at night, // blind fish ripening in a cave: / each finger paler than / its core of bone— // lilies, opening in a dim room.” The final section, “The Devout Life,” weaves together the strands of the previous two, exploring how we learn to exist within the natural world, within civilization’s many artificial forms, and within our personal relationships. The six precisely metered sections of “The Dark Ages” contrast the poet, as a boy, observing his mother’s daily routine with the transition of the Roman Empire to the eponymous era that followed. “For years,” it begins, “my mother shuttled from her garden / to the stove, from barn to sewing room to sons, / her life like an unopened work of history.” As in so many of these poems, the poet wrestles with whether or not to open that work.

Najarian has a gift for the memorably precise image. Soil in a drought is “translated into dust, / then lint, then ash, and at last / to smoke” (“Longed-For Rain”). The smell of paperwhites is “the odor of honey drizzled on carrion” (“Paperwhites”). The poet often experiments with meter and end rhyme to great effect, drawing power from both the predictability and the variations. Every poem, every image and line, feels wonderfully measured, appropriate for a volume so focused on the ways time passes and the means by which the nub of a thing—a name, a memory—remains. It makes for a rather enthralling perspective, one that feels at once old and young; this is, perhaps, the poet’s preferred way of seeing. Najarian recalls the infectious naïveté of the goats his family raised on their Pennsylvania farm. “In their eyes,” he writes, “everything was ready to be tasted… / They had selves without self-consciousness; / their gestures celebrated their desires… / They broke though fences, scorned electric wires, / obliterated gardens. When you found them / They rubbed their heads on you for gratitude” (“Goat Song”). These poems taste and break and desire in the same way.

An impeccable collection of tenderly crafted poems.