The sexes wax poetic on gender

I FEEL A LITTLE JUMPY AROUND YOU: A Book of Her Poems and His Poems Collected in Pairs, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye and Paul B. Janeczko, Simon and Schuster, hardcover, 256 pages, $17.

When I was growing up, I had a friend who had roaches in her house. I felt nervous going in there, but I also felt intrigued. Where else in our clean neighborhood could you sit and watch completely unthreatened roaches crawling up the wall? Although I squirmed when I thought of roaches in my own house, I was intrigued by the ones that lived at my friend’s. They were icky.

I guess you could say those roaches made me feel a little jumpy because I liked them and I didn’t.

In the poem “Jump City,” Harryette Mullen takes that same kind of jumpiness one step further in describing the way men and women communicate:

I feel a little jumpy around you.

Like when I think a house has

roaches, and I watch everything

out the corner of my eye to see

if it crawls away.

The first line of Mullen’s work is the title of a new collection of poems written about gender and the way men and women look at the world. Edited by the popular poet Naomi Shihab Nye, who lives in Texas, and Paul B. Janeczko, who lives in Hebron, the book pulls together 196 poems — half written by men, half written by women.

Most of the poems in this 256-page anthology are easy to read, accessible to both the poetry lover and the poetry novice. The book is directed at young readers and is probably best suited for teens. Some of the poems are funny, such as Gary Margolis’ “For the Woman at the Fast-Food Fish Place Who Called Me Pig,” and some are poignant, such as Richard Peabody’s “Burning the Dolls,” a reflection on how burning Barbie dolls as a child prepared the narrator for what he would see as an adult soldier at war.

Organized in pairs, each poem has a mate that explores the same theme, language or imagery. The editors, who call themselves “dueling anthologists” — and, indeed, display their feisty relationship in marginalia — hope the poems will expose intriguing contrasts and connections between the sexes.

In the first segment, called “Heads on Fire,” several of the poets reveal painful memories of childhood, anger at parents, and a desire to understand slippery emotional inheritances. Some of the poems border on being trite, but the most successful of them — such as M. Eliza Hamilton’s “For My Father’s Mother Who Has Alzheimer’s” and Cornelius Eady’s “I Just Want to Testify” — tell stories about true courage and bravery and personal progress.

There are three other segments in the book, and the last one, “Separate Longings,” is the most entertaining. Including works by Lucille Clifton, Philip Booth (who lives in Castine), Charles Simic, Robert Bly, Jane Kenyon, Marge Piercy and many lesser-known poets, this section has the best sense of humor and the most soulful writing.

“I Feel A Little Jumpy Around You” is easy reading. It will debunk any notions that poetry is intimidating and foreign, and will appeal to young readers as well as adults.

As careful as the editors have been in accepting the premise that men and women are created equal but different, the book still has a separatist tension in it. The male poets are always first in the pairs, and the female ones always have the last say. In the index, the two groups are listed separately by name, and jointly by work. For writers who truly believe in connections rather than divisions, Nye and Janeczko might have found better ways to deal with these technicalities.

None of that is as wearisome as the pesky friendship between Nye and Janeczko. In addition to separate introductions, they include copies of faxes they exchanged while compiling the book. The barbs are funny at first and probably go a long way in humanizing the process of reading and criticizing poetry. The editors make poetry into an everyday thing, and that’s valuable. Possibly it will appeal more to young readers.

But as with all relationships that rely too heavily on sarcasm and gentle insults, it gets boring and often seems stilted. It makes me feel a little jumpy thinking two poets couldn’t come up with a more original blend of humor, jabs and friendship in their own writing.