A TAXI TO THE FLAME

A debut volume by a former editor at The New Yorker, where many of these poems first appeared, flirts with chaos (—To understand chaos, be chaos—) but never submits—instead, this writer for public television remains poised and somewhat stately throughout her stylish book. Karp’s lyrics proceed through the logic of metaphor; she heaps simile upon simile until we end up far from the original image or idea. But her tropes do not always support the weight of her one-line insights: cleaning a parakeet cage in “Harm,” she avers, “There is such harm in love—; “Insurance” builds to the glib notion that “Love is in the rewrites—; and in “Tied to the Earth,” the equanimity of spiders and dogs “makes us forget / To question who we are.” Often speaking of angels and dreams, Karp at her worst seems precious: her cityscape, recognizable as New York, avoids the grit and clamor for charming street scenes (—The Consequence of Waking—) and abstractions. The poet’s strength, though, is in her fresh vision: dust becomes “the minerals of hell itching under the kitchen floor—; stars ascend “to the all-night cafÇ at the corner of eon and ion—; and, driving in a car, the mountains “rise and turn, / Like the past raising / Its broad back.” In “Winter and Its Steps,” she plays the piano for an audience of family pictures, and in “Dark Blue Ribbons under the Streets of the City, ” she transforms the city and finds renewal in its future possibilities. Karp staves off despair and “dread conscious” by keeping close to the surface of things, lest her visions spiral out of control; history threatens in a number of compelling poems ( about her grandparents and about war) but she retreats into myth. Karp occasionally loses herself in a muddle of abstraction and a thicket of tropes, but this is a promising debut nonetheless.