"Poets Make Their Central Concerns Evident -- And Not So Evident"  by Maureen N. McLane Maureen N. McLane, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University, is visiting scholar in comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross  by Mark Yakich Penguin, 75 pages, $16 paper The wackily deadpan title of Mark Yakich's first book comes from a caption under a photograph in "Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations," a 1956 collaboration between a psychiatrist and a poet. Suffused with a zany melancholy, these poems offer their own kind of surreal, lyrico-socio-psychological observations and diagnoses: "It's true, the man says. I have only one testicle. Logic chopped the other/off," the poet writes in "Missteps in the Ballroom." The book features couples at cross-purposes, people who shift gender midpoem, scenes that veer into loopy denouements:     He has built a safe harbor.     She has managed the honey.     Both have grown     into mature women. Weird fables, kinky vignettes and perverse landscapes (one poem is subtitled "After Balthus") proliferate: funky fictional characters like the Invisible Man's Daughter and the Queen of Tarts star in Yakich's cracked fables: "The Man With Two Shadows had sixty-four lovers,/not an outrageous number/as compared to the Invisible Man's Daughter." For all their willful high jinks, these poems return repeatedly to central lyric preoccupations: identity, erotics, mortality. For Yakich, fables and fairy tales -- their generalized characters, crucial encounters, tests and dramatic resolutions -- provide the elements for a sophisticated, compressed, sometimes cryptic but emotionally resonant poetry. The undertow of the book is best condensed in the two-line poem "Before Losing Yourself Completely to Love":     Drop bread crumbs around your feet.     You will find yourself far away and hungry. This work partakes of an idiot-savant stream of contemporary poetics, sharing something of the deadpan sorrows and sudden humor of Loren Goodman's "Famous Americans." (Yakich's notes are full of the slyness and experimental spirit animating his poems. He informs us there that two poems "were originally written in English, translated into Danish by Eva Green, and then retranslated into English.") This is a poetry of miscommunication, misconnection, static, random conjunctions suddenly made meaningful (as in the title). Loves go awry, stories askew and -- as the title of another poem has it -- "The Teller Is the Only Survivor of the Fairy Tale Ending." Like Rebecca Wolff and like Loren Goodman, Yakich brings a zippy, lowdown, deranged demotic into his sometimes elusive verse:     I am trying to learn how to cook. In perfection class,     they told me I added a little too much sugar.     That I blanched one too many mensches. Devastating minimalist lyrics analyze love and sex:     Sometimes lovers lie     Together     Sometimes a lay is all     We're good for. The work bespeaks a broken yet palpable romanticism, with one poem called "Nocturne" and lines like these from "Matinee": "Lie down a spell,/there, in the sheltered garden next to Schubert." Yakich takes his epigraph from Fernando Pessoa, the brilliant, early-20th Century Portuguese poet famous for writing under his own name and under three heteronyms -- names for different, wholly distinct poetic personalities. There is in Yakich something of Pessoa's exuberant prankster; we see as well a recurring motif of multiplied, divided and transformed identities, subjects veering toward and away from themselves as well as others. As "You Are Not a Statue" concludes, "We are not/together, we are not alone." If lyric has typically offered the contours of single and singular voices, Yakich fractures his voice, distributing its effects among several characters. His lyric voice is not a simple private interior thing but a social function as well: As he suggests in the mock-sociological propositions of "Trireme," to assume that the human being is "a social animal . . . will minimize those errors that were made when the human being was assumed to be solitary." Zooming between fictive social scenarios and a fissured inner life, stationed between hermetic solitude and the impasses of desire (for sex, connection, understanding, for a good joke), these poems jump-start the lyric, blasting it out of stalled pathos, revving it up for all manner of uses -- narrative, comic, elegiac, erotic, "each drop of rain/An amorous dialogue." They celebrate their own purposeful purposelessness, that special privilege of art (as Kant argued): "How lyrical it is/to be off to nowhere." {published September 26, 2004, Chicago Tribune}