Coffee Spew

Not yet thirty years old, Jonathan Regier is a gifted, word-mad poet whose style owes as much to rock ‘n’ roll lyricism as to William Blake and Baudelaire. His debut collection, Three Years from Upstate (Six Gallery Press, 2008), blends bohemian wanderlust and religious allegory in a manner reminiscent of the Beats, which is not surprising for a writer born in Indianapolis and currently living in Paris. Regier is adept at portraying urban bleakness in “New York” (“Unctuousness of the subways, beyond midnight, / in the earliest morning, when the steel and plaster / Do their rotting …”), as well as pastoral beauty in “The Country” (“The stars are wild tonight, and the air is in frost. / I’m stepping on old pine cones through the snow”). There is large-scale ambition on display: Three Years from Upstate is distinguished by four long narrative poems, diverse in themes and imagery. Rabbit holes and parallel worlds abound, crumbling slums give way to hidden kingdoms, wooded farmlands trail off into haunted prairies. My favorite of the longer pieces is “The Hunting of the Beast,” a noirish murder mystery with Val Lewton overtones (“A large cat might have done it. A tiger. / The nearest zoo is so long away, it’s got to be a big dog. Possibly, / A bear”). Jonathan Regier is a poet to watch.