Zoo Music

William D. Waltz. Zoo Music. Brooklyn, Slope Editions, 2004.


There are a great many nice poem's in Zoo Music, the first book of Minneapolitan William D. Waltz. Of the thirty-three poems in this small book over half of them are affecting, gracious, the best of them effecting a series of unbroken gestures arriving at the a quite epiphany by way of smoothly orchestrated digressions. Here is an example, almost all of “Opposite the Phantom Limb”:

“If mountain aspens could be astounded
To discover chloroplasts quivering,
Like roe on a windshield,
At extremities of summer lush
Or master carpenters dumbfounded
By the galvanized claws
Of a hammer in a red cell's deadend,
then someone ought to be surprised,
Still, by collages, legs attached to cherries
Or fishes, or by words
Pasted by digital fingers, dexterous,
Acid free, aping, infatuated.”