In canto IX of the Inferno, just after we have been titillated and terrified by the Furies, Dante turns to his reader and says: “O ye who have sane intellects for guide/Consider well the doctrines that for cloak/beneath the strangeness of the verses hide!” The immediate effect is to turn the reader’s reading inward, and to emphasize the allegorical nature of the poem, of language. A similar address is effected by the piece that stands at the entrance of Steve McCaffery’s latest collection, The Cheat of Words, “Catech (I) ism”:

Q: Why does speech breathe?

A: Speech breathes in order that I may
diversify a milieu.

Q: Which words are the fastest?

A: The ones that reproduce a repertoire.

Q: Which meanings now inaugurate our
facts?

A: Those meanings bordering a known
legitimated function.

Q: Which function is that?

A: The tendency to dwell between new
predicates.

Q: Which systems of signs are the slowest?

A: The ones of effect and either way.

Q: Which function erodes?

A: The one of departure.

As the unassimilable rebel “I” in “catechism” seems to enact the impurity of the word as a unit of meaning, so the poems in this book are like baroque pearls. As the title of the collection states, words are imperfectly trustworthy. McCaffery’s work, as anyone knows who is familiar with the Concrete school of poetry, or the American l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets (McCaffery is associated with both), is of a challenging order.

Some of the poems, such as “A Book: For Mallarmé,” are expansive and incantatory. “Although the renounced page is the cataleptic page there are no trumpets/like historic pages, spawned and anguished pages the comprehended/pages on a ready page in oil and planted on a page of love.” “Page,” the word, makes here a Ulyssean journey through a roiling 76-line “narrative.”

Throughout, the writing is taut and – though “free verse” – extremely formal. As the reader will find, what appears to be nonsense is often only mimetic of nonsense (a curious inversion of a much more familiar habit of words), and “meanings bordering a known legitimated function” demand our attention. Some poems keep their secrets more studiously (“Motive for Mass”); some engage in Beckett-like comedy, such as “Critique of Cynical Poesis” (“Comrade Krashennikova/I am answering your question./Esperanto of the cortex should/take place a little to the left/ of one ear”).

For the lover of words, or, in Barthes’ words, the “lover of signification,” McCaffery’s accomplished style lays out here a smorgasbord of delights. But if it all sounds a little too much like the convulsive nonsense of Nimrod in Dante’s Malebolge, pass on.