Tableau with Crash Helmet

Tableau with Crash Helmet features free-verse narratives that bear a New York stamp, from their local settings and subjects to their wry musings and apocalyptic shadings. In “New York Minute,” a grizzled harpist in a subway station “render[s] his version/ of a cosmopolitan afterlife.” In the title poem, set in the shadow of St. John the Divine’s cathedral, a “human gargoyle/ crouches over [a]/ discarded umbrella.” The spirit of the rationalist René Descartes duels with that of the skeptic David Hume in the final poems of the first section. A New Year’s Day meditation unfolds in a sequence of anxious prose poems that structures the concluding section. As a whole, the collection marvels at the heart, which, reason notwithstanding, sometimes craves, like a famished cat, “its can of stinky-fish.”