BLUE GUIDE By Lee Briccetti

Four Way Books $15.95

Reviewed by Irina Moga 

Lee Briccetti’s latest poetry book, Blue Guide (Four Way Books, 2018), opens a secret door into the parallel lives of poets—reality and reflection, writing techniques and raw feelings—and into the omnipresent sense of place as one of the anchors of the creative process. 

A poet and long-time Executive Director of Poets House in New York, Briccetti immerses the reader in a modern and innovative approach to poetics. Blue Guide (titled after Blue Guides, travel book guides with a focus on art and literature) is crafted from poetic commentaries and observations of alternating itineraries through places that nurture the author’s lyrical discourse New York City, Rome, and Heart Mountain:

Day is a blue bottle,

transparent but closed.

O, say the Romans, Our city is

built on broken glass, let it break. (5)

The book is organized into five sections and a helpful Notes appendix that provides additional clues into the genesis of the poems. There is an orchestrated crispness in the poet’s writing style; words are pared down to a (very expressive) minimum that carries the message through:

In the fugitive human presence, I am a ghost 

in minor warehouses

(hours of sulphur butterflies).

Who imagined this future 

& its permissible

ideas? (27)

The juxtaposition of words and punctuation emerges as an enigmatic poetic shorthand, which is likely to result in a high degree of reader engagement—we are eager to turn the page and work our way through the next set of lines.

Indeed, the use of punctuation—comma, slashes, ampersand, double spaces, dashes  serves to set the pace within poems and is a forte of Blue Guide: “,English is where we meet, trace Latin / ,I love, we love, our story / ,sun’s distance from Time’s start” (89).

Inserts of comment boxes in the right hand corner on some pages invite to meaningful asides and add new depths to verses. On one instance though, I thought the repeated use of italics appeared to be taking away from the flow of the poem. 

It is however the development of ideas—generous, compassionate and articulate—that makes Blue Guide a “moveable feast,” one that takes us through a mosaic of moods and check-ins with day-to-day life. 

The author weaves allusions to other poets’ work (Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman) through an elaborate and nuanced re-interpretation of some of their themes. 

I particularly enjoyed Briccetti’s poem endings, where a climactic tension often acts as a kind of musical coda: “Made to Disappear, wordless. Worse // than a dream” (88). 

Blue Guide is an exciting collection of poetry; Briccetti’s volume delivers novel forays into the word-syntax-punctuation continuum and makes for an absorbing read.

Romanian-born Irina Moga is the author of four poetry books and a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada. Her work has appeared in Canadian Literature, dandelion, carte-blanche, PRISM International online, The Chaffin Journal and others. Irina’s latest poetry volume, Sea Glass Circe, was selected for an official book launch as part of the 2020 Toronto LitUp!, Toronto International Festival of Authors.