Alarie's Reviews > The Echo Chamber: Poems

This is my fourth book of poems by Michael Bazzett in addition to his translation of The Popul Vuh, and I already feel like I’m running out of ways to describe what I read. There must be a bazillion things to say about Bazzett’s work, but he says them all himself in ways that make reviews feel dry and lacking. In his blurb, Matthew Olzmann says this collection “should establish Bazzett as one of our best cartographers of human strangeness.” I’d go ahead and give him the grand title.

Each Bazzett book goes off in unforeseen directions, can terrify and amuse, make us read a poem and read it again and maybe again a third time before we can bear to turn the page. Yet each collection has its own personality.

I don’t know how recently Bazzett wrote these poems, but my own bleaker view of the world in the past couple of years makes me think he was the sober eye taking notes on mankind’s inhumanity and holding the mirror up to us during the pandemic. Unlike Narcissus, who stars in many of these poems, some of us cringe at what we see and some of us look over our shoulders to see just who the moron is that is acting that way. Not me! Not me! Still, not seeing our true selves may be slightly better than falling in love with our every lie and selfish act. Much of the book involves retelling the myth of Echo and Narcissus, hence the book’s title.

“Inside the Trojan Horse” reads like an excerpt from a Greek tragedy. Some off-stage narrator perhaps is asking questions of the Trojan chorus (like why a horse would be the gift that fooled them)…

“And where did the invaders lie?

In an unworded silence

in the stifling interior

in the belly of the animal–

And why?

Appetite–

And why?

It is always only appetite

And if?


If we had built

our building as ruins


it would have saved us

so much time–…”


One of the most disturbing poems for me was “The Problem”:

“…those who had been

unable to resist

owning a grizzly the size of a house

cat were forced to watch

the animals

slowly lose the function of their back legs

and drag their limbs behind them

in an uncanny echo

of a miniature sea lion.

What made it worse

was how good-

natured the little bears turned out to be,

how accepting

of their fate, as if they’d known

their legs would last only a little while,…”

To summarize, I want to mention one last poem, “The Singular Library of Mr. N____.”

“Every night, he returns home and reads the same book…

The thing is, it is always the same book. But what it says

changes. With every reading. Sometimes just a word or two.

Sometimes bigger things.”

Although the poem veers into the realm of surrealism or magical realism, this is the sort of magic Bazzett manages in his poems. You can come back and read them again or someone else can borrow your book, but every reading will be different.