Poetry. Asked to give a one-sentence synopsis of his previous collection,
Yrtemis
, Edric Mesmer quipped: "Things friends have said of my writing... 'For you, language seems to function on the level of the syllable—perhaps even of the letter'... 'Antique furniture in modern rooms'... 'Meaning swims up here and there, amid abstract music, then swims away'..." These seem fair enough "summations" also of this, his latest book, which was declared winner of the 2014 Outriders Poetry Project competition by judge Jerry McGuire. The musical terms of its title, OF MONODIES AND HOMOPHONY, suggests another description: music beneath the mind, that is, abstract resonances other than those of conventional "meaning." Surprisingly, the occasions of these poems are often quite specific—an odd feature of the Buffalo cityscape, a painting by a friend, a set of frames from a film—but Mesmer never indulges in describing them and even less in lingering over or meditating on them. Instead he at once makes evocations squirt now here, now there, in playful crosscurrents of suggestion. A reader must swim or slide around and have fun, and will definitely miss the fun if he/she finds only what he/she is looking for.