Jack and Jill in Troy

Bob Perelman's latest book of poetry, Jack and Jill in Troy, makes use of the rapid clarity of Homer and the elemental incantations of nursery talk to create a compelling array of poems that speak to our present moment with tragic humor and urgent, skeptical directness. A rather R-rated version of Jack and Jill appear in some poems, as if a worldly-wise Mother Goose is addressing young and old in the same breath. In other poems the world of the Iliad appears-- permanent war economy, never-finished gender negotiations, continual power disputes, absolute hierarchies arbitrarily enforced-- but both these nursery matters and the ancient epic trappings are brought forward to provide a wide-angle frame onto our own situation. The poems in Jack and Jill in Troy are immediately legible, suggestive, and surprising.