Rebel Angels boldly proclaims to define "a revolution, a fundamental change, in the art of poetry as it is practiced in this country." This new movement is supposedly comprised of poets born since 1940 who are leaping from the shoulders of their formalist predecessors, who include the likes of J.V. Cunningham, John Hollander, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Mona Van Duyn and Howard Nemerov, to rough up traditional verse and "give new vernacular f to ancient forms." Sadly, despite the ambitious and important agenda of editors David Mason and Mark Jarman, this anthology breaks no real new ground.
    Just two of twenty-five poets featured in Rebel Angels come close to combining prosodic skill with linguistic risk to redefine traditional verse. Poems by Sydney Lea and Rachel Wetzsteon are structurally tempestuous and intricate in harmony, free of the cramped tone and stylistic monotony creeping into the work of roughly half the poets in this anthology.
    Wetzsteon, whose first book, The Other Stars, appeared in 1994, chronicles love from the viewpoint of a dominatrix-muse who has momentarily ditched the traditional sonnet and invented a form of her own. In "Three Songs," composed in three sections, each metrically innovative, a love-stricken woman prefers to revel in mania rather than elegantly pine away or distract herself with good deeds: "Teeming humanity/in all its wonders, though,/ when I am love-stricken,/ bores me to bits./ Better to hole myself/ up in a mania,/ rave in a ready-made/ palace of fits." In section two, Wetzsteon elegantly shifts from bracing dactylic dimeter to iambic tetrameter as she contemplates abusing her lover: "What if I locked you in my chamber,/ gave you a trauma to remember?/ After the days of nonstop violence/ and the long nights of grisly silence,/ would your rock-hard, unwilling heart/say yes, though your lips said no?" Though occasionally an odd article or two disrupts sentence flow, Wetzsteon's voice is unusual for its irony. Her tone hearkens back to the past but shuns the traditional iamb in order to assert a thoroughly modern attitude that stops short of the confessional. This poem's twin, also entitled "Three Songs," fuses Latinate and Anglo-Saxon words to compose a beguiling signature diction: " The threnodist stopped his story in mid-sentence:/ why were all the listeners looking down,/each pair of eyes encased in its own sorrow,/each pair of lips contorted in a frown?" These poems seem to emanate from a twentieth century adventuress impersonating a nineteenth century adventuress.
    While Wetzsteon invents ambitious formal combinations, Sydney Lea invigorates blank verse with irregular rhymes and uneven lines. In "At The Flyfisher's Shack" language becomes almost transparent, its sheer physicality enhanced by the poem's aural beauty: "A structure, yes. You'd hardly say a house./ I say he loved it, though, the man who died here./ (In truth he seemed to pay it small attention.)/ I find a blue-dun hackle neck he used,/ some orange fur he pilfered from a kitten,/ a tying bobbin hanging by its thread there,/ a vise that held his hooks, the verdigris/ collecting now where silver plate once was./ A cap. A pair of boots. Impressions, these,/ of his career, or were they first suggestions/ of its end?" The irregular internal rhyme scheme counterpoints the pentameter magnificently, speeding the line up while sharpening detail. " ...I see in mind the nose that dropped/toward the fly he tied, and ever nearer/every season; clear as tears, a bauble/ gathers at its tip. I know this ought/to be grotesque or droll, and is and isn't./ He couldn't wipe it off, in concentration/ rapt, in study, building something fineÑ/ ephemeral, he knew, mere fur and feather./ Was this man good? Like us he was and wasn't." The poem's end cautions without pompous pondering: "His bobbin swings along its vague ellipse./ The chosen and unchosen: flies or lives;/ obsessions; patterns; things put on or not;/ paths of sure intent/ or otherwise."
    These young poets are exciting and well worth discovering. But also vying for attention in Rebel Angels are too many tired voices. With lackluster metrics, Bruce Bawer's "Grand Central Station" recalls the sudden death of a young friend. Form and voice deflate rather than cohere; the reader is left to sift for a few emotional crumbs rattling in the poem's hollow shell. It is hard to feel sympathy for this narrator and his world full of . . . "paradigms/ of American youth. Poised, affluent, and clean/-cut ...they're on/ their way to ...houses set beneath a still blue sky,/ each with its Porsche, its wide and quiet lawn,.../ And me?/ I'm going to a Hastings-on-Hudson church/ to say farewell to one who should have been,/ sixteen years hence, a freshman Ivy Leaguer/ heading home for ChristmasÑbright, slim, eager/to see his parents, waiting for a train." Bawer is an unrebelling angel, satisfied to let a poem of this scope rest on its laurels, its personas and complex subjects unprobed.
    Bawer's tone seems strangely distanced given the poem's grave topic and portrays a scene far removed from contemporary America's suburban perversions, pathos, repressions and outbreaks of youth violence that slash racial and economic boundaries. Undoubtedly, there is pain here and a subject worth writing about, but the poet uses tone and verse to portray a life unbelievable and unlived. Meter obscures emotion and what might have been a much more interesting story. Poems such as this remind one that meter is cruel: defects glare and ears cringe when emotional clarity and formal control are unbalanced or even worse, nonexistent. As many poems in this anthology reveal, form manipulated poorly or taken for granted can drain the sexiest poems of passion, rob poems about beauty of grace, sap poems about a generation of poignancy. Rebel Angels contains other poems that, if they don't redefine, at least refine form until there is beauty and occasionally, rapture. R.S. Gwynn, Rafael Campo, Tom Disch, Dana Gioia, Mary Jo Salter, Molly Peacock, Phillis Levin, and Emily Grosholz have poems here that, though not groundbreaking, are well-tuned, sonorous, and intelligent.
    Rafael Campo employs colloquial language to illuminate romance in daily details. His iambics in "For J.W." are unannounced, masterful and intimate, and transcend gender to explicate desire: "I know exactly what I want to say,/ Except we're men. Except it's poetry./ And poetry is too precise. You know/that when we met on Robert's porch, I knew./ My paper plate seemed suddenly too small;/ I stepped on a potato chip. I watched/ The ordinary spectacle of birds/ Become magnificent, until the sky,/ Which was an ordinary sky, was blue,/ And comforting across my face..." Campo's voice remains eccentric even with the constraints of fairly regular blank verse.
    Without one padded syllable, the poem refreshes and collides two cliché-ridden themes: the imprecision of language and the futility of love. . . . "I knew/ Or thought I knew, exactly how I felt./About...fragility and paper plates. I look at you./Because we're men, and frozen hard as ice/ So hard from muscles spreading out our chests/ I want to comfort you and say it all./ Except my poetry is imprecise." Like all fine poems, whether free-verse or measuréd or read by a New Formalist, Old Formalist, or Anti-Formalist, "For JW" is formally accomplished and emotionally felt.
    Indeed, if a poem is really good, who cares about "counting the fucking syllables?" (I paraphrase Rebel Angels' editor Mason who expressed his disgust with critics who pounce upon any poem announcing a metrical scheme.) But readers should be mindful of syllables, stresses, and rhyme schemes for the sheer dimensions of pleasure they offer. Mason and Jarman have the right idea. It is a worthy endeavor to present the most mesmerizing formal poetry in America, to applaud its formal innovations, its technical and intuitive insights. But to ensure that readers remain magnetized by formal verse and inspired by writers who are supposed to "lead poetry into the 21st century" Jarmon and Mason could have been more judicious in their choices. By including more women poets writing in form, they could begin to dispel the misconception that the New Formalists are run by a bunch of dull white men. These pages need a much more consistent range of talent such as one finds in the anthology Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, edited by Philip Dacey and David Jauss in 1986. (This was the first major anthology of formal poetry to be published since the "War of the Anthologies" which occurred in the late 1950's and 1960's between the "Academic Poets" and the "Beat Generation.") Indeed, it's time to follow through on the promise of Jarmon and Mason's own introduction, to bring about "fundamental change" and make way for a more exciting modern canon of metrical poetry.