rev. of Goodnight Gracie by Lloyd Schwartz

Lloyd Schwartz's writing displays a peculiar combination of gifts -- observation of personality; loving attention to homely turns of language, neglected as stray cats; a moral generosity that cannot be called "forgiving" because it declines to condemn in the first place; a formal aptitude for triolets and off rhymes; a way of being funny that in the old distinction favors humor over comedy; and above all, an intense vocality.

Speech is his muse. In his first book,
These People, Schwartz created poems based on the interrogative pauses, the evasive rushes and defiant ellipses, of conversation, a method that may be most clearly brilliant in the love dialogue "Who's on First." The unpredictable alternation of extreme and domestic, sensational and ordinary, all comprehended by a sense that speaking is as natural as breathing, was another hallmark of that book.

The quality of voice achieves at least an equal variety of effects in Schwartz's second book,
Goodnight, Gracie: straightforward pathos in the poem "Gisela Brüning," great intensity in "Simple Questions," complex layering of emotion in the excellent title poem. I have to say that in "Crossing the Rockies" the voice -- as voices will do -- goes on too long. But as in
These People, Schwartz's writing always has integrity. Nothing is pumped up or dolled up.
Goodnight, Gracie marks a significant new step in a distinctive, humane body of work.

Robert Pinsky's most recent book of poetry is The Want Bone (
The Ecco Press). He is completing a translation of Dante's Inferno,
which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next year.