Ricardo Sternberg’s poems offer pleasure. His forms are elegant: he loves three- and four-line stanza and even writes a sestina. He is not stiff or banal like some of the contemporary formalists: like the trapeze artist in one of his love poems, he makes the work appear effortless. He’s a master of the love lyric. One of the best poems, “Mobius Strip,” uses the metaphor of that peculiar ring of paper with a twist to describe the union of lovers in bed. The Mobius strip appears to have two sides yet has only one, a conceit the Metaphysical poets would have loved. He respects tradition without losing his originality. One of his poems, “The Fish,” is a rewriting of an Elizabeth Bishop poem of the same name. Another, “Florida Reprieve,” is a new take on the singing muse in Wallace Stevens’s great poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West.” “The Ant,” Sternberg’s retelling of an Aesop fable, has a wonderful phrase redolent of Stevens to describe the improvident grasshopper: “the jongleur of our meadows.”

The extravagance (as in the root meaning, “wandering about”) of his imagination is superb without straying into whimsy. He has a poem about an angel who joins the Moscow Circus, and he has written interesting poems about such unusual subjects as quarks or a millionaire who sneaks into heaven disguised as a camel. The Bible is one of his intertextual sources: he writes about the marital breakdown of Noah and his wife, the Tower of Babel, Jonah, and-most interesting of all-the birth of song out of Satan’s lament for the fall of Eve. Only once does he miscalculate, with “Thumb,” a poem which collects too much lore about that digit from history and science, generating a two-and-a- half page poem which lags quickly. The other poems have the rightness of external form inseparable from internal meanings. As with a Mobius strip, there is no disjunction between inner and outer: by some mystery of geometry a twist makes them into one. Sternberg’s imagination makes that maneuver. mRb