From Publishers Weekly
Joseph reveals his biography and background early, his fiery style and intellect somewhat later, in this reissue of all his earlier poems. The son of a Lebanese immigrant, Joseph attended Catholic schools in Detroit, where his family endured segregation and violence. His debut volume, Detroit of Shouting at No One (1983), spoke up in rough unrhymed lines much like those of the early Philip Levine. Curriculum Vitae (1988) showed a poet more comfortable with his brainpower and more at ease with abrupt transitions, making his way around England (where he lived after college) and, especially, around New York City, where he worked as a lawyer. (Joseph now teaches at St. John's University Law School; he has written a book of nonfiction called Lawyerland.) The Lebanese civil war of the 1980s gave Joseph another powerful subject, suggesting a "God/ who changes tears into bombs." More original but more uneven, Before Our Eyes (1993) incorporated some halting love poems but also made constant use of terms from economics and law: "Is it true, the rumor that the new/ instruments of equity are children, commodified?" By presenting two simultaneous collections (Into It), FSG hopes to jump-start the career of a cult author; while the material here engages, it never fascinates.
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Joseph is an attorney as well as a poet, which accounts for the legal tone of the title of his retrospective collection,
Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos. Joseph also has a penchant for reasoning, yet these are molten works, and reading through his earlier poems is to journey through his poetic and philosophical development. Beneath the stable crust of memory is a search for identity. Joseph delves into his ancestry by considering his Lebanese and Syrian Catholic grandparents' homelands and history, and their place as Arab emigrants in the U.S. Through reflection on this heritage and the violence of his Detroit childhood, Joseph ponders anger, choice, and fate.
Into It, which collects his newest work, reveals a different poetic voice, one that is more abstract and fluid. Here Joseph is less narrative-based and more symbolic, less angry and more disillusioned, less personal and more universal. Many lyrics seem "coded" with essayistic digressions that gracefully intertwine question, observation, and emotion. Being a New Yorker in a 9/11 world has certainly resonated with Joseph, and the melancholy, grief, and hope of so many people coming to grips with large-scale violence is palpable. Many of these poems are deftly painted (perhaps an influence from his painter wife) with feeling as brushstroke, judgment as perspective, language as dimension, metaphor as theme.
Janet St. JohnCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
