[In the generally favorable review below, Diehl-Jones examines the strengths and weaknesses of Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love.]

Erin Mouré opens her new book, Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love, with a poem that in certain ways sets up her whole project:

      What is "transubstantial" in the word, the hallucination of
      this & that, the words not containers of meaning but
 
      multipliers, three tongues in one mouth, distinction
      without denotation or connotation, this, that, referential.
 
                  .....
 
                   The beauty of
      this & that, as if even memories are transubstantial,
      & they are, alive in maps of neurons
      in the cortex
      beside the maps for presence, for place in the universe,
      for hearing, for sexual feeling, hereafter
 
      known as love
 
      the unmentionable
      ("Corrections to the Saints: Transubstantial")

Once words are not containers but multipliers, the whole poetic universe blows open: you aren't telling but discovering. Then even the unmentionable can be spoken.

Mouré's intelligence, it seems to me, is to assume always the proximity of those maps of neurons. Language bumps up against memory, vision, dream, thought. Which gives many of the poems in the book a kind of dreamlike sheen:

      When they lie side by side, the wanton horse (love)
      A book slammed shut, the echo
      Stood up sudden then resumed their duties "cutting hair"
      The third form of possession or madness, of which
      poetry
      When they lie side by side, recanting
                  ("photon scanner [blue spruce]")

I like the stubborn illogic of this writing, the evocative power of these Ashbery-like shifts. Still, Mouré doesn't confine herself to this styling; many passages are closer to prose, and range from narrative to self-reflexive commentary to theoretical inquiry. "Hope Stories," for instance, threads its way through dream narratives, dream theory, and poetic fragments. Throughout the book, modes—imagistic, political, elegiac, interpretive, playful, erotic—coincide, proximate maps of our knowing.

In a way, Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love teaches you how to read. The you approaching the text is invited (sometimes ordered) to participate in the gradual accretion of significance; images, like words, are not containers but multipliers in this writer's hands. Birds, blue, hay, city, shoulders: all recur conspicuously, wind themselves into a net to catch you up.

Mouré will occasionally provide a kind of playful critique of what has preceded, answering her detractors before they can speak. In some cases, these pieces are brilliantly funny—"The poem lacks simple narration. Simple narration is absent and / it doesn't work to make a mystical image out of celery, even as a / joke." ("Corrections: Executive Suite")—but it's a posture that, for me, wearies quickly. On the other hand, a previous reviewer (quoted mid-poem) has relieved me of having to comment on the flurry of intrusive exclamation marks.

In an epigraph to one of the poems, Mouré invokes Gertrude Stein: "Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really frightening." Sheepish Beauty, Civilian Love is an unflinching and delicate exploration of the absolute dangerousness of any world one might inhabit, the knots and losses and confusions and revelations that accompany our attempts to speak and love ourselves to life.