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Untitled, 1959. Art by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. Used by permission of Rich Shapero. © Rich Shapero.
The Combustion Cycle (Roof Books, 2021), by Will Alexander, gathers three long poems written over two decades: “Concerning the Henbane Bird,” “On Solar Physiology,” and “The Ganges.” At more than 600 pages, the book calls attention to one of the great originals of contemporary US poetry, and at the same time it’s a record of something else something that has less to do with contemporary US poetry and more to do with another model of time and tradition. It feels like a record of a shamanic engagement with nature, with geological time, and, perhaps most radically, with what the political theorist Jane Bennett has called “vibrant matter,” the movement of supposedly “non-living” materials, such as metals and rocks. Alexander seems to be both the most American of poets part of several US traditions and almost not even writing in ....

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