Sadoff collection blends simplicity, twisted logic> Colby professor’s ‘Grazing’ rewards multiple readings

GRAZING, by Ira Sadoff, University of Illinois Press, paperback, 72 pages. $12.95.

Ira Sadoff’s fourth full-length collection, “Grazing,” opens with one of those poems that is bound to be the envy of any poet (myself included) who reads it: a seemingly perfect elegy. “My Mother’s Funeral” is actually something of an anti-elegy, paying tribute to the deceased through a list of her eccentricities and faults, the special qualities that made her human. Here’s how it opens:

The rabbi doesn’t say she was sly and peevish,

fragile and voracious, disheveled, voiceless and useless,

at the end of her very long rope.

Sadoff goes on to describe his mother in terms at once unflattering, painful and tender. “If I must think of her,” he says at the end of the poem, “I’ll say she was one of God’s small sculptures, polished to a glaze, one the wind blew off the shelf.”

This poem and a similar one, “Biographical Sketch,” recall poetry workshop prompts: “Write a love poem in which you use no terms of endearment” was an exercise I had in graduate school. Yet Sadoff avoids the pitfalls of the purely formulaic, bringing all the wealth of experience and language to bear on every image, on every line of verse.

Sadoff has been teaching at Colby College in Waterville since 1977 (he is currently the Dana Professor of Poetry) and ran the Creative Writing Program for nearly 15 years. An earlier chapbook collection, “Maine: Nine Poems,” testifies to his connection to the state. He also was included in Wesley McNair’s remarkable anthology, “The Quotable Moose: A Contemporary Maine Reader” (1994).

Sadoff’s work is not for the easy-reading crowd. A number of poems reflect the brutal chaos of modern life, “the rapid fire channel switching” referred to in the opening line of the title poem, the sensory overload that is captured in the poetry of Joseph Donahue and other contemporaries. A poem may start with a simple line like “The quake struck down my father’s condo” (the opening line of “The Quake”), but in the course of the stanzas that follow you are apt to find yourself on a winding path with side trails and even dead ends along the way — like the twisted logic of dreams. Which is not to say that Sadoff is opaque in the style of, say, John Ashbery. The poems, however abstract they may be, reward multiple readings.

Historical figures — Richard Nixon, the composer Vivaldi, jazz pianist Bud Powell and Civil Rights fighters in Selma, among others — make appearances in Sadoff’s poems, viewed through a personal lens. Nixon, for example, receives a no-so-fond farewell on the day he is laid to rest: The poet pictures a man “whose blood would not circulate,/whose face was paralyzed, who should have died/ in shame and solitude” — not to the strains of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony.

The new book contains few references to the poet’s home territory, but they are notable. One of the best poems in the book, “At the Movies,” opens with an evocation of New England autumn: “An October drive through the leaf parade:/blood reds, pumpkin yellows with a cast of green.”

This riot of color leads the writer into a tribute to movies. The final lines evoke that sentimental classic “On Golden Pond,” “phony as a sermon on the virtues of the family,” Sadoff states, but which once gave the poet “a place to grieve and rest my feet.”

Sadoff is one of those nationally recognized writers, like Baron Wormser of Norridgewock or Philip Booth in Castine, who goes about his work in a quiet way in Maine. His poems, short stories and essays have appeared in just about every top magazine and journal, from The New Yorker to The Paris Review, and have been included in anthologies too numerous to list. “An Ira Sadoff Reader” (1992) might be the best introduction to this multiple threat, prize-winning author, but you could also give his new book a read-through. I assure you the grazing is good.

Carl Little is director of public affairs at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. He has published eight books including one volume of poetry. He lives in Somesville on Mount Desert Island.