[Top Soil is a collection of three of Joe Rosenblatt's earlier volumes]—Bumblebee Dithyramb, Blind Photographer, and Dream Craters—with additional bits and pieces (More of the Insane) and a good hefty selection of his witty, congested, eminently explorable drawings….

Top Soil is a Rosenblatt celebration. For fans.

Of which I am one. Mainly because of the intense pleasure I have always felt upon entering the Green World Rosenblatt has constructed over the last decade for the performance of his slightly scattered but always absorbing mythopoeic three-ring circus.

This Rosenblattian Green World is a cosmos adjacent to ours, conceived, quickened, and shaped in the forge of the poet's extraordinary animal imagination. It is a morally and aesthetically ruminative zoo where all sorts of unlikely things lumber and twitter and flit off into a night of previously unexplored psychlorama and come back (onto the page) with the goods about the human condition. Usually presented in a spotlight of metaphor….

For Rosenblatt, metaphor (to shift the metaphor) is a kind of gateway of transformation, a wicket of admission within the poem by which the reader is ushered into Rosenblatt's Green World of febrile possibility. There is always payment exacted for this admitting. A sort of toll. And that is the wrestling you have to do with ingenious but sometimes ham-fisted marshalling of metaphorical language and ideas. When it works it works very well indeed:

         Bees are truck drivers of the sky
         Who burrow into diners of flowers
         to be fed therein, and overhauled….

Would it not be monstrous here, given Rosenblatt's poise and originality, to recoil in Wildean alarm at his proximity to bathos? It's that very kind of danger that, safely averted, is the source of much of the delight the poet has to offer. When Rosenblatt's really cooking, he can charm the bird out of the tree and down onto the page. He can descend into a maelstrom of bestiary, kid's book, passion play, and workshop in sonics, and come up smelling of poetic roses….

Sometimes the forcing of the metaphor is hard and aggressive. The poet sets up a direct transformer, an act of poetic will, that refuses, right there in front of you, to function. "Sky is pigment" is one example….

There are times when Rosenblatt's extended metaphors take on a sort of gothic angularity and become savage with sudden juxtapositions, with conceits worthy of Donne, with the improper horror of Fuseli, with the askew but royal paranoiac address of Salvadore Dali….

For Rosenblatt, a poem appears to be the record of an imaginative event. In that event's retelling, he eschews the simile—because of its structuring of the world into the statistics of weighted equivalences. For Rosenblatt, the world teems with the Brownian motion of constant and meaningful metamorphosis. Best presented by the poet's ark of alternative voices each declaring to the reader that things have changed and that the reader is being admitted to that change—now metaphorically recreated for him within the poet's lines….