Blue Guide

"As longtime emcee/curator of the Hammer Museum’s poetry-reading series, Stephen Yenser has presented many heavyweights and lesser-knowns of modern American verse. Since his pithy, personalized introductions have often resonated as much as the verse that followed, I’ve often wondered: What of Yenser’s own poems? It has been more than a dozen years since the publication of the UCLA English prof’s first — and only — collection, the Walt Whitman Award–winning The Fire in All Things. Finally, we have a chance to read — and hear him read — the original products of his restless imagination. As one might expect, Yenser’s new collection, Blue Guide, inhabits a creative zone where playful formalism coexists comfortably with flights of free association and jazz improvisation, where keenly skewed observations ripple through a steady-flowing current of parental and fraternal love and seriously tweaked humor. In one sense, Yenser is an L.A. poet or, at least, a Southern California poet, as underscored in the longer work, 'Los Angeles Fractals.' But a wider sense of place, whether it’s the Westside or the rural Greece illuminated in 'Sfakian Variations,' puts him in the camp of les citoyens du monde. He deeply cares about humankind but can’t overcome entropy’s overwhelming yank and pull or capture memory’s elusive clarity for long. Fond of alliteration, pun and cadence, Yenser seeks out syllabic and sonorous synchronicities, such as this couplet celebrating his daughter Helen in 'Tidepools: La Jolla': 'Barefoot, braid swinging — from a broken breaker, your shrieks/Bringing a cloud wisp’s blush-brushed color to your cheeks.' Whether perused on the page or heard aloud, Yenser’s poems reveal a contender in our midst."

"In his second collection (after the award-winning The Fire in All Things), Yenser, director of the creative writing program at the University of California, Los Angeles, ranges widely over subject matter, from meditations on the California landscape to a retreat in the Aegean. The poems are eclectic in form as well, including a ghazal and a series of elegiac valedictions. Readers encounter the work of a technical virtuoso, with the lyric 'To Fall' an exquisite example, beginning with the epigraph 'Where are the songs of spring?" The poem continues, 'And what of summer's own cadenzas/They've also gone.' The promise of deep attention is fully realized in this poem and in others here. Attentive readers who have high expectations of contemporary poetry will find much to hold their interest. Still, one is left feeling the book does not go far enough, that the poems hold deep wells not brought to the surface. Highly recommended for larger public and academic libraries."