The Lost Boys Poems [Paperback]

Daniel Groves presents a debut collection of tightly rhymed poems that, through adherence to form, unlock a power in language to surprise and illuminate—a power too often dormant in writing that eschews these conventions. Enchanted by the wit and distance of his canonical predecessors, Groves rhymes “Diet Pepsi” with “catalepsy” and “Guido” with “credo,” and takes this work from irony to introspection in the course of a few lines.

Framed as meditations that playfully depart from acts of photocopying, or shelving journals in a library, or interstate travel by bus, these poems represent an acerbic inner life but offer visceral satisfactions.

Sometimes I amuse myself by trying to characterize Daniel Groves’s poems. If Samuel Beckett wanted to write like Alexander Pope, but with the tiniest dash of Odgen Nash . . . If Byron had a child with Jorge Luis Borges, and that child had studied with both James Merrill and Groucho Marx . . . I give up. Daniel Groves is a poet like no one else. He’s one of the most inventive rhymers since Byron, but rhyme is merely one thing he does superlatively. What about those complex, self-interrogating sentences, rich with word play, puns, and puns inside puns—all to purposes as serious as art itself—and life? The Lost Boys is a book any reader of contemporary poetry will have to contend with from now on.

Could Dan Groves be the poetic love child of Heather McHugh and James Merrill? McHugh’s unstoppable puns and wordplay, enriched by Merrilƒš