Culture March 22, 2013

Craig Morgan Teicher’s third book, To Keep Love Blurry, name-checks only one of mid-century American poetry’s big-name Roberts: the now-unfashionable Lowell. Like Lowell, Teicher meticulously probes the intersections of writing poetry and living life. He can be lacerating, as was Lowell, in his depiction of himself as a father and husband. But Teicher’s poems also obsessively chart a kind of epistemological and existential anxiety, often in the manner of another mid-century Robert: Creeley, who once enjoined, “So keep on tracking—life.” When Teicher is at his best, he “tracks life” in a compelling and singular way. His long poems “Layoff,” “On