Picture This: For Your Eyes and Ears

Poetry. Art. John Trause's learned, at times daffy, provocations outdo the achievements of his two patron saints--the snarkily crafty Catullus, and the outrageously conceptual Duchamp. What Trause gets, which neither predecessor could, is how exhilarating art is in its infatuation with freedom--and how art must, true to its muse, tip poetry akilter. Trause is a classicist whose work is finely attuned to both the music and rhetoric of the western poetic tradition. Yet his poems contain no niceties. PICTURE THIS possesses an authentic wit unique and more valuable than readers may first realize, surprising in its risks.--Burt Kimmelman