Cory Brown’s latest collection, Elisions, demonstrates what Anne Sexton says about form and content. Form is a cage, Sexton observed, while the content is the animal that moves in it. Brown’s book feels rigid on one level. It is divided into 4 sections—Desire, Knowledge, Compassion, and Time—and each contains 11 poems, and each poem is formed of haikuesque 3-lined stanzas. And then within this structure, the poems move with lively energy.

They engage heady and eternal themes like form, numbers, aging, nostalgia, beauty, romance and emptiness, but these concepts are each rooted in specific, nearly overlooked experiences. In one poem, the speaker is sitting in the backyard on an autumn afternoon “sipping on some home- // made plum vodka from / an eight-ounce jam jar.” (15).

Brown profiles his father’s illness during WWII, in “somewhere along the arno,” an illness that enabled him to survive but burdened with the guilt of returning to the front he learned that his sub was killed. That reflection rises out of a childhood memory when the eight or nine year old gathered up his toys to “show how scant / my prize for being / so good” was. In other poems, it is the specific and actual that manifest the conceptual, like in the brooding poem “Toes,” which he starts out by saying are “the perfect argument for / materialism” (63).

No matter how the abstract and concrete interplay, what makes the poems so lively is the nearly offhand, conversational style. The tension between the tight form and easy tone enacts the title concept, elision. This tension creates gaps in what is considered, letting implications and suggestions hang in what is not said, as shown in “somewhere along the arno.” However, elisions are also fusions, or scars on a horse where a fissure “heals to be / what’s called ‘proud flesh’” (11). And these come from what is said.

Much of the healing results from an honesty that lacks self-pity, which is rare in writing about “scars from our past lives / from all those old promises / and blind betrayals” (11). In “solitude” Brown writes, “i used to be in / love with the pain of my own / solitude which i // thought made me a more / compelling person” (79).

Another source of healing is in celebrating the quotidian, like in “the bee” quoted earlier. The delights of thought and musing is also on display in Elisions. For example, in “beauty,” Brown personifies the subject, saying “she still rides the // glassy surface of / small ponds as a bright full moon / in the dead of night,” but then slyly positions himself on the shore, gazing, telling himself that “i’ll not reach for her… / ill not fall in and drown like / a drunken li po” (22).

The chatty use of language belies the disciplined formal consideration that contain it, and I appreciate how they entertain very real and serious concerns. To achieve all sides of this tension is a rare achievement, and that’s what Cory Brown has done in this collection.