The Thomas Salto, Timmy Straw’s debut collection, offers what very little poetry in our time seems to manage: work that is both overtly political and unflinchingly aesthetic. Ben Lerner, Brenda Hillman, Jay Wright, Anne Boyer, Chris Nealon are others whose work comes to mind. But Straw’s work marries politics and aesthetics in a way maybe not seen since George Oppen, and the gift of this collection is both the lyric mystery it generates and the position of moral clarity from which it operates. To do this, Straw refuses any neat resolutions that pay lip service to the fashionable pieties—these poems, like Hillman’s or Oppen’s, take those pieties for granted, as background noise, as a starting point at best:
Occasionally,
our freedom intrudes on us
like real sunlight thru a snowglobe
like real sunlight on a painted sun
hot as a fresh-cut tree
as a flung side dappled saw
To turn and see it face to face,
to be
both sight and self
it swings upon
