A BRIEF PROGRESS

This travel-themed poetry collection examines intersections of culture, history, and perception.

In his second volume of poetry, Jarrard explores locations such as India, France, Egypt, and Mexico in pared-down stanzas of free verse. Many pieces wryly note collisions of old and new, as in “Tailgate Wisdom Saves Lives.” The speaker is traveling in India and, having recently left the airport, now drives along dirt roads by Parsi sky burials. But he hasn’t journeyed into the past; this is a crowded, contemporary world of automobiles with bumper stickers and businesses that advertise slogans like “Maha Cement—Build It Strong” and “Total Piping Solution.” The profane and crass are inextricably tied with the spiritual and refined: “Brass bells. Incantations. Prayers. / Monkeys suck vulgarly on faucets / and fart and argue in tongues. / Tin boxes take worthless rupees.” The poet’s spare and striking language—“suck vulgarly” is almost onomatopoeic—forces attention from image to image, re-creating the dizzying feel of these contrasts. The poet’s sensibility is as complex as what he observes: touched by beauty, wry, rueful, melancholic. The voice in “Just Getting Warmed Up,” about flying to Las Vegas to arrange a cremation and collect the remains, displays several such registers. The speaker can be savage, referring to the body as “a vacuum bag posing / as a saturated corpse,” a kind of Egyptian pharaoh in the inauthentic Luxor Las Vegas style. But even the city’s cheap, lurid dazzle is not as ghastly as the crematorium euphemisms, which the speaker replies to with gritted-teeth restraint that’s signaled by a lack of commas: “Do you wish to view the insertion? / No I do not wish to view the insertion.” In all his poems, Jarrard provides sharply honed observations that will stay with readers.

Vibrant, well-crafted poems with a strong sense of time and place.