To say that Deborah Landau is a poet of the body is to risk obscuring the fact that she is a poet of the urban body, the urbane, the human being alive in the twenty-first-century city. Hers is New York. “Soon we were enthralled, engaged, en route to / Kleinfeld’s, it was hard to find a dress, submit, …” But it’s not the pallor of a wedding dress that lingers here, but the whiteness of bone. Landau’s latest book, Skeletons, is composed of untitled acrostics (s-k-e-l-e-t-o-n-s spelled down the page like ladders of bone) interrupted every so often by poems called “Flesh,” which begin with lines like “To be afraid of every edge, the falling off of it. / Walking at night. Walking under the scaffolding …” Bone and flesh, the inner structure and the outer matter—and so it is a book about death (an “incessant / klepto”), and sex (“red life animal press”), and the persistence of form. And it’s a book of poems that mostly start with the letter “S”—has that ever been done? It makes for a powerful and compelling mixture of repetition—the setting up of an expectation—and variation, a leaping, humming, often anxious weather generated in the unfolding of each poem. The book begins:
