In 1987, Mary Kinzie angered quite a few poets when she published “The Rhapsodic Fallacy,” taking to task the flat, sarcastic verse of her time. It seems to me that American verse continues to find itself too concerned with small ironies, fearful to leave the safe haven of the ironic, only attempting the rhapsodic poetry of ages past wearing a smirk of self-effacement. Martha Greenwald’s debut collection fascinates for its ability to walk a fine line between American poetry as it is and as Kinzie once imagined it might be.

On a virgin read, many of Greenwald’s poems struck me as careful, well-crafted, incidental poems. Her titles make no bones about this: “Crosswalk,” “Listening to the Car Radio At Night,” “At the Checkout,” etc. There is nothing wrong with these kinds of poems except their ubiquity. What kept me reading were the moments when Greenwald lets go, when clarinet cases become “furred…animals with silver bones” (Crosswalk), or her mother’s arms are suddenly “amputated as she reaches / down to retrieve bread” behind the seat (“Quarterly Meeting”). For a line or two the poems make the imaginative leap that Robert Bly called the “deep image.” For a moment, the self-consciously anti-poetic writer, so familiar to us in the twenty-first century, allows her poems to slip into the dangerously rhapsodic diction that Coleridge argued for in his condemnation of Wordsworth.

Upon returning to Greenwald a second time, however, I doubted my initial impulse. Her poems attempt the “deep image” metaphorical leap, but only some reach the other side. In “FindAnyone.com,” this leap takes us from internet searching to the “morning the Challenger blew up,” and then to a rhapsodic moment where the speaker dances away her troubles. This is an accomplished poem, but something about dropping the Challenger into the poem seems forced, even for someone like me who watched the explosion on television in eighth grade and wept.

On a third read, poems where the turn consisted of some public event, like 9/11 (“September 26, 2001”) or the Challenger, seemed to try too hard to get our attention. Less self-conscious were those that used the speaker’s personal life as the turn. However, “At the Checkout” sends us leaping back in time to find the speaker’s mother collapsed in grief over news of her father’s death. Here the personal turn falls short of the high mark set by Greenwald’s best poems. It is well-crafted, the final image returning us to the opening—we can summarize it, analyze it, use it to teach technique—but the visceral moment of the poem itself is thin. It is the skin of a well-crafted poem.

Greenwald’s best poem, “1813,” fearlessly soars toward what Seamus Heaney calls “mouth-music,” a kind of poetry still allowed in Ireland, but upon which Americans frown suspiciously: “molten flesh like poultices / Leaking through sackcloth, tubers gone to rot…He dreamt of dead elephants floating / in lakes, then woke feverish.” The diction is so rich it seems almost un-American, and the subject is completely highbrow (she is writing of Shelley, no less), but this poem opened my eyes. Returning from it to her other poems a final time, I discovered a new pattern and the answer to what makes this writer’s work exceptional.

Greenwater’s best moments—a mother’s “amputated arms,” clarinets transformed into “furred” little bodies, “Chester” who “shirtless, lounges on the porch smoothing his milky parabola of belly…/ one thumb corked / in his navel” (“Severe Thunderstorm Warning”)—make poems not because each leaps out into the grand Romantic world of poetry Kinzie asked for, but because each links what it cares about to a movement inward. These poems show us a sublime imagination, as finely tuned as Coleridge’s, but at the same time decidedly modern. It walks a fine line, refusing to either stand ironically in its own shadow or to weep too loudly over catastrophe. In this collection, Greenwald creates a brilliant balance when she moves carefully but acutely toward a visceral description of the body.

Read this book—it is full of well-crafted work—but read “1813” first. It showcases the book’s themes of hope, despair, and friendship, working these concerns through the slowly decomposing mind and limbs of Shelley. From the depths of the body, “burrowing deep / Within the lymph glands,” (“1813”), Greenwald asks the questions that matter. She moves us with more than clever craft; she reminds us that great poetry can leap to the greatest heights, even if that leap is no longer outward and upward, but decidedly inward:

How thick is your ankle? Are we the same?