THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS FROM THE STONE

paper 0-8229-5669-1 Cox, who teaches creative writing at both Oklahoma State and Vermont College, shares many qualities with other regular-guy poets: He’s manly but sensitive, capable of celebrating the orgasm in one poem (—The Blindness Desired—), while displaying his concern for abused women and children elsewhere (—Style—). For all his heavy-handed ironies about adulthood, he’s a sucker for little kids (—those mini-versions of ourselves—), who seem to say the darnedest things: His five-year-old stepson asks him to —make the cobra talk,— in a poem with that name; and in —Even the Broken Bird Sings,— a little girl with braces wonders if he can —hear the stringed instrument/we live inside of?— —Little Heaven— represents Cox at his sentimental worst, with memories of ice-cream trucks and sandlot baseball, and he mourns his first failed marriage, represented by his ex’s forgotten necklace. Cox stretches to find significance in everyday things and in —the ephemeral, the tenuous, the inherently unstable,— but his Zen aesthetic also lingers on memory, that —long extension cord stretched into the dark.— —Again— reflects on some heirloom jewelry, and —Pulsar— on a widower’s rummage for the Salvation Army, but Cox complains directly to Death (—Talking Death to Death—) for reducing us to such things, including —measly poems.— Cox’s second volume (after Smoulder), with his short, undistinguished lines and talky cadences, seldom reaches the —higher consciousness— he claims to seek.