The designation “New and Selected Poems” sets up an unequal opposition. New poems are forced to compete with a selection representing the writer’s best work. Thus the odds are stacked against them. This is especially true in the case of The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems by Sherod Santos, whose early work is so exceptional.
Santos’s best poems reflect his high-stakes concerns as reflected by such titles as “On the Last Day of the World” “The Breakdown,” “Hymn to Necessity,” and “A Writer’s Life.” Yet the poems stay on the page. Clear, contained, and illustrative, they remain within the reader’s grasp. Rather than register a brand, Santos exercises control over a variety of forms and subjects.
In “Married Love,” Santos’s gorgeous sonnet from The Southern Reaches (1989), an adulterous couple’s lack of restraint carries the poem:
their summer shadows had detached themselves
from the confusion of those thousand leaves.
But no more than they could call their shadows
back from the air, could they ignore what they’d undone,
and would undo once more, that afternoon
before giving in to what they knew, had always known.
Santos’s line breaks aid and abet the affair—each line propels their lust forward in headlong rhythms. Thus, while the language is plain, the reader is able to experience the affair’s momentum firsthand. Repetition and an iambic pulse make this poem memorable, and, fittingly, irresistible. One is enticed
