Anthony McCann's second and most recent book, Moongarden, is as coolly atmospheric as its title suggests. McCann's lyricism is gelid, surreal, and eerie; in “October,” for instance, he writes, “beneath the park/ a globe of ice is growing/ shot through// with milky flaws,” creating a landscape that is more than winter bleakness. He also gives us moments of comic relief; in “October” the “trees/ raise their squirrelly fists.” Throughout Moongarden, McCann's combination of surrealism, absurdity, and repetition of imagery results in a work that expertly embodies contradiction. The poems are cohesively fragmented, the whole book drawn together by a schizophrenic grace.

The key to Moongarden might be found in one of its four odes, “Ode to the Sky.” The poet tells the reader, “It's an ode to schizophrenia.// O Schizophrenia, it says,/ You are like the weather–// A coincidence of symptoms/ And the name of the disease.” Moongarden is perhaps in its entirety an ode to schizophrenia with its surreal sensibilities and paralogical repetition. There is a weird comfort in the profound eeriness. McCann takes the reader through the frigid atmosphere of his landscape and reveals a lingering horror lying just beneath his words.

Like the fragmented subject matter, McCann's use of form also varies from poem to poem. Sometimes words drip across the page in minimalist stanzas. These sparse, breathy monologues only help to distill and refine McCann's images. In “The New Romantics,” his “nightbirds don't whistle/ they crack…,” and they vanish as soon as they are mentioned. Other poems contain blocks of prose, such as “Miami International Airport Hotel.”

It is the minimalist poems that best capture the starkness of McCann's landscape. Take for example the opening poem, “Moongarden (November).” The speaker informs the reader that, “I left my voice/ inside your body// when I drowned.” Water plays an important role in the book as McCann takes the reader through one dream setting after another. Lakes, oceans, and ice especially dot the landscape of the Moongarden, reflecting the light that also serves as a motif. Effective repetition is perhaps the poet's best skill, unifying the work while simultaneously giving it an air of madness.

“Moongarden (November)” is not the only moongarden in the book. Additional poems are titled “Moongarden (The Enchanted Prince)” and simply “Moongarden.” Just as nightmares and hallucinations recur and present their audiences with a phantasmagoric experience, images and phrases in these poems become hypnotic in their recurrence. “Querida Managua,” contains the lines,

This very night

That is not the night

That is the body

That is not your body

That is the night...

These repetitions come in after bold statements, fading in and out from bombastic to subtle language and back, just as the moon is obscured and revealed by clouds.

Other times, the repetition becomes humorous and highly clever. The poem “Moongarden” begins, “Because the moon is his most important organ/ Max is obliged to conceal it in his body,” and ends, “According to Max the moon is a map:/ a lifesize map of the moon.” There is a mad genius in McCann's redundancy.

Moongarden is not all wit and cool light glittering on water, though. One poem is titled “Woe to the Wildebeest, Whose Flesh is to be Torn.” These wildebeests spend their time “in the fevered hunt/ of fresh cocaine,” and are “specialists in refrigeration.” They are also not wildebeests, and they hunt the wildebeest. Such is the fragmentation of the Moongarden. Characters and objects are themselves and not themselves. For McCann, contradiction is a strength, and it disorients the reader not like vertigo but like fantasy. There isn't a sense that McCann is dazing his readers at our expense; rather, he is masterfully creating a psychological experience rarely found in contemporary poetry. The flesh of the wildebeest never actually tears, and this is exemplary of McCann's mood setting. There is an atmosphere of horror in the book, but the horror is a perfect threat: perpetual. As the title threatens the wildebeests but never wounds them, so violence is continually intimated but rarely in the reader's lap.

The poems eventually do present a bit of viscera. Blood is let in nasty ways in “Holy Week,” involving the burnt effigy of Judas and some mystery “things” that may be men, or swine, or both. Or neither. The flesh that “Woe to the Wildebeest...” promises to tear is actually torn two poems later, in “Arthur Rimbaud.” In keeping with the continual statements that the images in the poems are not themselves, McCann explained at his recent Tallahassee reading that this poem is not actually about Rimbaud. He also stated that the “president” mentioned in “Moongarden (The Enchanted Prince)” is not our current president, despite the praise he receives from fans who perceive the poem as a political indictment.

To see Anthony McCann read adds much to his poetry. Matthew Zapruder, his friend and one of the editors of Wave Books, claims that McCann is one of the best readers he's seen. At the Tallahassee reading, McCann showed no awkwardness in performing, getting down to business and delivering his verse without spectacle or lengthy introduction, relaxed in a way that's nothing like the mad weatherman who speaks in Moon Garden.

The more you read the book, the more you accept the dissonant mood McCann creates. His landscape, though quietly eerie and often grotesque, is just as often beautiful. Moongarden's pleasures, though dark and atmospheric, leave the reader not dazed but impressed.