Andy Weaver’s The Loom is probably the best book of poetry I’ve read in a few years. Subtly meandering through, stacking up, and repeating several key motifs—most centrally parenthood—the book strikes that rare balance between incredibly strong poems and a unifying poetry-project conceit. Several themes and formal techniques stood out to me.

The book begins with an opening section that signals Weaver’s strain of Language Poetry as well as a neoformalist approach. The words are divided up somewhat syllabically, as in the passage, “a sharp / wail // inside / the // after / noon’s // quiet / shell.” The minimalism and attention to sound anticipate the collection’s adept use of sound and form.

Weaver then flips to denser prose-style poetry—that is, full sentences lineated into poems, much like American poet Natalie Shapero does. The first main poem addresses mediocrity and social norms:

When I had journeyed half my life’s way,
I found I’d lost sight of love—just the sort
of line that mediocre, middle-aged men
have been using since the evolution
of male pattern baldness.

Lines unfurl and fold back on themselves in many subsequent poems, such as in the line “too unutterable, / too utterly ununderstandable.”

There are also awkward moments that mirror the disorienting experience of parenthood. An especially dynamic section includes the lines “We worry to watch the birds flitter, / hatchling, nestling to fledgling and first / falling flight.” A weird moment happens when Weaver writes:

Or how we notice our mouth most
when the wasp threatens to enter it—not
a honey bee, with its Southern Gentleman,
Foghorn Leghorn façade of manners[.]

There are also fun and unexpected moments, like when “III.iii” exclaims, “Snap! Crackle! Pop! You’re Old!”

A key theme in the collection is the confluence of inevitability, maturity, conformity, and (in the context of comparison with the novel, i.e. Lukács’ Theory of the Novel) romance. In the section “ligament / ligature,” for instance, the tension between new experiences and social norms is encapsulated in the phrase “in a time / that is outside / of time.” As part of this theme, Weaver finds compelling ways of describing the stereotype of being washed up or obsolete:

                       you’re either
lost in a podcast on obscure
tv shows from your childhood,
sympathizing with the technical
troubles of shooting Fonzie
over the shark tank, bending
over to pick up the last of winter’s
stored doggie-doo from the lawn
when the drive-by’s ricochet
hits you square in your favorite
cheek[.]

Interestingly, there’s a coda poem after the acknowledgements. By this point the book’s themes and formal techniques are all piled up, the book also folding in the ancientness and physicality of language:

Because their footprints in the mud resembled
cuneiform writing, birds were believed
by Mesopotamians to transcribe the thoughts
of the gods. Better to mark out the walkways
with barley-meal and watch the songbirds,
fickle little oracles, fly down and feed, scattering
every path into twisted, unreadable sentences.

The Loom uses the word “love” and its various forms 152 times. It’s a compelling way of connecting its themes—parenthood is, after all, a series of narratives. And Weaver weaves them together so well.