87 North
Reviews

From <Publisher's Weekly,> April 26, 1999:

The number of times the phrase "my son" appears with earnestness in Coffey's second collection will surprise readers of his highly experimental first, <Elemenopy.> But this book, titled after the New York State highway the poet takes to travel from his current life and family on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village to the upsated New York of his youth, is no less searching than the first. When, in "My Quarrel with Languqge Poetry," the poet asks "So my son at six is told/ his best friend's father has died./ Told by me and my wife in his bed./ Is this not a fit subject for poetry?" The book, exquisitely cohesive, is more than a mere transition between styles, and it is buttressed by three long poems-the elegiac prose work "February Thaw"; the riinging "thirteens" of "Rhythm City"; and the astonishing opener, "In Robert Motherwell's Car." In the latter's careening journey through the poet's past, "Truths, like aphorisms, are a line long," and the poet tries several on for size: "Jack L'Aventreur"; "Donati's spooky decalcomanias"; "a dead man,/ a chess piece, oh me"-among others. Throughout the book, father-son relations reverberate, as the poet traces the source of his laconic, formerly hard-drinking ways, and delights in his son's exuberance. It is Coffey's ability to bring such close-to-home issues explicitly back to poetry that readers will find most moving, as in the mock-trifle "The Apple": "For there's something some say/ 's near organic/ about the end of the line, hey!/ and the way it plays/ with sound. . . . so much better/ I seem// in a free form/ on a fallow farm./ The only worm in the apple/ is that's it's only an apple."

"A splendid book with a really unified vision, wonderfully crafted and a great achievement. The book is intensely Irish in its vision, and tremendously moving." -Eamonn Wall

"I haven't read anything quite like it. Truly original."

-Thomas Fleming, author of <Remember the Morning>

"Coffey with a steady formal vision makes maps of our cultural touchstones. For the reader traveling <87 North>-the route that transects New York state-it is a pleasure, even when the terrain, both urban and rural, is toxic. Engaged and impersonal at once, Coffey's poems rile and sooth us with their brilliance and compressed beauty."

-Hilda Raz, author of <Divine Honors>

"I've lived in New York City, and I've lived in the Adirondacks, and so can say that Coffey understands both these marvels in some deep way. Understands them so well he can distill their essence, drip their meaning out like water through a percolator, each drop full of bitter flavor. With this book he becomes a poet laureate of the Empire State, and of a much wider and more unbounded realm as well." -Bill McKibben, author of <The End of Nature: Hope Human and Wild>

"The poems that wait for the reader along route 87 North artfully combine an inviting colloquial voice with a solidity of language and a rich texture of verbal music. There is much to be discovered in these nimble, surprising, and delightful poems." -Billy Collins, author of <Picnic, Lightning>

"Michael Coffey's second book exhibits the ferocity of his range: polemics worthy of Pope; quick delights which ignite in wit; and dazzling, luminous poems that mix the language and geography of upstate New York with history, faith, autobiography, and poetic inheritance. It is a marvelous book, and a daring successor to his language-centered debut, <Elemenopy.>"

-Susan Wheeler, author of <Bag 'O' Diamonds: Poems>