Using familiar landscapes that include New York and San Francisco, the author offers a portrait of contemporary life Green Sees Things in Waves signals a great leap forward for August Kleinzahler. He has always been a fine musician. Here, however, he goes beyond the image-based poem, and renders a fluid consciousness in a manner that is at once precise and expansive. The most striking formal quality is the syntax. On a smaller scale, it enables the poet to pull off some wonderful, almost hieratic touches: note how he ascribes "that narrow russet instrument of face" to his subject in "Vulture Under the Palisades." On a larger scale, his syntactical play allows Kleinzahler to pepper his poetry with pop culture, Americana, the everyday, and his touching and intimate observations of people. All of these qualities are expertly packed into this sinuous sentence from the memorable "Snow in North Jersey": It is with a terrible deliberateness that Mr. Ruiz reaches into his back pocket and counts out $18 and change for his LOTTO picks while in the upstairs of a thousand duplexes with the TV on, cancers tick tick tick and the snow continues to fall and blanket these crowded rows of frame and brick with their heartbreaking porches and castellations and the red '68 Impala on blocks and Joe he's drinking again and Myrna's boy Tommy in the old days it would have been a disgrace and Father Keenan's not been having a good winter and it was nice enough this morning till noon anyhow with the sun sitting up there like a crown over a great big dome of mackerel sky. Here as elsewhere, the poet constantly shifts focus, both visually and in terms of diction. Yet even as reality and dream "mingle and dissipate," Kleinzahler always affirms the ultimate reality of the imagination. --Mark Rudman Kleinzahler's poems snap like flags in a brisk wind as he deftly sketches complex little scenes rich in implication. In the title poem, a fellow named Green is still hallucinating years after eating "quite a pile of acid." In "Silver Gelatin," a man watches a woman in a black hat and coat pushing a pram on a cold day. He writes about interstates and airplanes, the diaries of Joseph Cornell, a disorienting dream, Tonka toys, the ancient Cathayan art of pulse reading, and encounters with animals, friends, and family members, eccentric little exchanges that disclose much about the hot and cold of our psyches. For all their smartness, Kleinzahler's poems have an aura of wistfulness, as though they were carefully printed on airmail stationary and posted to a lover who never writes back. Donna Seaman Kleinzahlers fourth book relies on a wealth of voices and styles, from the hipsters scatty lingo to the three-chord cadences of rock-'n-roll; his sense of absence in the bleak West recalls the withered artistry of Sam Shepard, while his urban talkers sound like Mamets sharp chatterers. Kleinzahler exults in the confluence of accident and artifice, and his casually surreal poems appear more accessible than they are, though the title narrative simply reflects an acid burnouts madness, not the refractions of physics. Snow in New Jersey scans the industrial landscape and declares the past aesthetics of social realism as nothing more than an idea in a book. Tanka-Toys and Toys both riff on youthful pleasures, discovering truth in a spaldeens bounce. Taking a cue from the collage art of Joseph Cornell and Ezra Pound, Kleinzahler arranges his images for sonic effect since, as Glossolalia All the Way to Buffalo suggests, words come loose/of their moorings and fall apart. 52 Pick-Up is little more than a selection of evocative words and phrases, with a tip of the hat to Irwin Coreys absurdist semantics. But his funky rhythms and itinerant sights support a wildly original vision. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.