The New York Book of the Dead & Other Poems

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

This is Gardiner’s third book, consisting of poem-sequences of the poet as anthropologist, baseball fan, and archaeologist, digging through the ruins of a New York City mugging. The first poem presents the poet/anthropologist as “clever jive ass / jumping about backward s’s,” and this sensibility informs much of the first two sections. Although some of the anthropologist’s lists are interesting conceptually, his preoccupations are slight. Similarly, the baseball fan’s section relies far too heavily on name-dropping to appeal to other than an aficionado (the poet could learn from Ray Souster and George Bowering here). Of a four-page, eighteen-section poem, only one small section, “Baseball in Vancouver,” rises above the anecdotal.

The sections are not discrete: baseball and anthropology occur in sections dealing mainly with their opposites. This fusion is most successful in the title section, a hellish scenario of “gangs /with baseball bats in the Nubian /night,” of “the Cameroons on 5th Avenue /breakdancers and pickpockets.” The fresh diction (“half a stacked /deck”), rhyme (“rappers delight, muggers tonight”), and recurrent symbol of the “blue car of death, as well as the timeliness of the subject matter, make this much more accessible and successful than the first two sections. This would have been a strong chapbook; there is too much dead weight for a successful full-sized book.