Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems by Craig Morgan Teicher

Publishers Weekly

This first book, winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry, has the plainspokenness and unguarded candor about writing and ambition more often found in a later book by an established poet-think Robert Creeley. As such, it shows a rarer thing: a young poet in thrall to the promise of being a poet and taking that as his topic. Teicher, an associate editor at PW, quotes E.M. Cioran-"one does not write because one has something to say but because one wants to say something"-and, in these 22 poems, he seeks his voice ("Inaudible voice, silent voice /voice of my head"), analyzing who he is hearing: a father, a mother, the voices of other poets-A.R. Ammons and William Bronk among them. Ammons, in fact, is unabashedly imitated in the leisurely 40-page "Poem to Read at My Wedding," while Bronk's "as if" formulations drive several of these poems: "As if// a thing lost or forgotten, discarded,/ fled, written down and revised, revisited/ were a cure for dead dogs...." Teicher puts his faith in the hypothetical "as if," as if being in love with poetry made poetry, as if being in love made love. The book's title poem conflates these two-poetry and love: the room in which the poet's wife, Brenda, roams and works is also the stanza, which itself means "room." Part of the charm here is how poetry and love are not suffered ironically, but gathered and won, "As if the answer is flowers"-a surprisingly sage observation for this young poet who indeed has something to say. (Jan.)

Karla Huston - Library Journal

Brenda (the author's then fiancée, now wife) may not be in the rooms of all these poems, but Teicher is. In this winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry, the poet/prose writer challenges readers at every turn to examine the abstractions of voice and silence, of thought and reflection, of words. "The spaces between/words are their thresholds," he writes, and this is where he enters to find meaning. Often playful, these poems are about the mirrors into which Teicher looks to examine a world that looks back at him-looking at the world. And they are of a calculated randomness: as he writes, they are "little photographs of/a mind trying to look at itself." In the longest piece, "Poem To Read at My Wedding," Teicher-the late poet A.R. Ammons holding his hand all the while-examines "ideas, because the point is to/record the process/of writing obsessively to stave off/silence to see what sounds/I am impelled to make in order/to head off a void." The rooms of these poems will challenge some readers, but there is often something delightful to consider there. Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.

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