The book's second poem is so good it made me want to stop reading. If this is where we are by the end of page four, I reasoned, the rest of the book is bound to be downhill.

Entitled "The Power Grip", the second poem is about friendship, about sex, about abuse, about women, about shellfish. It reminds me of nothing so much as "Oysters" by Cal Bedient - straightforward, almost talky in its phrasing, but beautiful and dark and sinister underneath. I'm not going to quote it. Pulling it apart wouldn't bring its beauty to you. Get your hands on a copy of the book and read it yourself, and when you get to poem two, remember that's the one that really first grabbed me.

The rest of the book, to my surprise, largely lives up to my initial delight. "For a cook" eulogizes the chef who, disgusted by overly-picky patrons, added semen to a pasta sauce. "Artichoke" in which the flower of a couple's romance is ribbed with spiky petals. "Locker Room Etiquette", instructions on how to seem uninterested in other men in a locker room shower. "Merman", a haunting rewriting of the oldest sailor-mermaid story.

My final delight, in reading this book, was in coming across "Hot." The first line seemed familiar: "I'm cooking Thai - you bring the beer." Hm, I thought. I wrote a short story once that involved Thai food and beer; I eat Thai; I drink beer; is that why this sounds familiar? By the second couplet I realized it was too familiar. A line or two later I realized that I'd read this poem, sometime in the past, and had no idea where it came from. And that I'd loved it then, and sure enough, I love it now. It colored my entire day to have rediscovered a poem this good. (For what it's worth, I now remember reading the poem in a Best American Poetry anthology a year or two ago; the book jacket claims it was 1998.)

Shells is a gorgeous book. Selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by W.S. Merwin, the book plays with the idea of shell as house, shell as casing, shell as self, shell as form. The book's strength is the way its subjects become metonymy for each other: sex, food, humanity, the creatures of the sea. I borrowed this from a local library; I devoured it; and now I'm going to go buy a copy. This is a book I want on my bookshelf, so that the next time I need a dose of something salty and alive I know where to look.

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