Eleven years ago, Honeysuckle Imprint published J. William Chambers's first collection of poetry, Camellias in August, a book with which Chambers was not completely happy, a book that, nevertheless, garnered a Pulitzer nomination. Now comes A Taste of Wine and Gentian, a collection of poems that even Chambers admits is his best work to date.

"I've always wanted my poetry to have a 'distinctive' voice-one outside the current trends in poetry," Chambers says. In A Taste of Wine and Gentian, Chambers achieves exactly that goal. Take, for example, these lines from "For One Who Sometimes at Midnight Goes Through all the Kitchen Cabinets Searching for Happiness" in which the most mundane items become metaphors of love and loss and pain and joy: "I tell you this./ You will find only perishable happiness/ in jars of tomatoes, salsa, pickles, and jellies,/ or in bags and boxes of chips, crackers, and cookies,/ or in tins of tuna, sardines, ham and chicken."
"I hope that in A Taste of Wine and Gentian I tap a deeper vein," Chambers says, "that I recognize genuine emotion in each poem. I think this is the secret of drawing in a reader, that the reader can share emotion or sentiment. Ruskin once wrote that poetry is an 'expression of one soul talking to another.' I want all the experiences, the interactions, the intimacies, the ideas, etc., (in my poetry) to be there only for sharing."
Chambers accomplishes that "sharing" without becoming sentimental. Sentiment is present, of course, but his poems approach the challenges of living and the finality of death with subtlety, juxtaposition, surprise, and a sense of humor.

Throughout the book, Chambers makes deft use of irony. "Irony," he says, "forces the writer to have great restraint, less it come across as sarcasm. It's interesting that the less harsh it is in wording, the more cutting it becomes. I do have my tongue in cheek a lot in my poems, a type of grim humor." "New Puritans" is a case in point: "Just flip on the television…/ You'll find the new Puritans/ in full covenant with Moses and the Israelites,/ a new tribe with the same fragrant pieties/ of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards." The poem takes the reader on a tour from the "pulpit pounder…whose manna at the table is, no doubt, overabundant" through war and hypocrisy and revelation, and, in the end, back to "…the pulpit pounder/ still railing at adulterers,/ gays, lesbians, feminists, pro-choicers/ and beseeching God/ of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses to intensify/ the heat in the lake of fire and sulphur-/ that place he calls heaven's junkyard." In "New Puritans,'" Chambers says, "I deliberately did not want the lines to become invective, or to become personal and splenetic as if I were writing sarcasm. Instead, I'm sad about the state of Christianity. Within that point of reference, it becomes irony, one long poem of nothing but irony."

Perhaps the book's only weakness is in the middle section where a group of poems about death have been gathered. The effect becomes nearly overwhelming at times as emotion knots inside the reader, as mourning becomes utmost-mourning for each poem's subject, mourning for each person the reader has lost along the way as well. But the section that follows brings the reader back from the depths of loss and sorrow with irony and humor. This book is extraordinary in its emotional depth, drawing tears and laughter and always deep contemplation. Do yourself a favor. Buy the book. Powerful. Frail. Funny. Sad. Human.

- C.S. Fuqua