In his short essay “My Interior Vita,” Will Alexander writes, “I was born under Leo, under its sign post of heat, and what has evolved from such colouration is a verbal momentum always magnetized to the uranic.” The uranic is a word that is perhaps singularly representative of Alexander’s hallucinatory style, in which a fascination for the astronomical and the scientific intersects with mythology. No poet’s subject matter is more diverse: in “Song in Barbarous Fumarole of the Japanese Crested Ibis” (The Stratospheric Canticles), he portrays an animal’s extinction from its own point of view, and in another poem from the same collection, he speaks in the voice of a remora describing its voyages attached to the sides of large fish; Asia and Haiti, which consists of two long poems, lays out the histories of Haiti and Tibet; in a poem from Above the Human Nerve Domain, Alexander discusses the use of Yoruban gods in poetry; another explores Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism, and in the poem immediately after, the mathematics of Georg Cantor. In the forty-page “The Stratospheric Canticles,” the subject of which is the act of painting and its relation to seeing, Alexander ranges from Alberti to the Persian painter Behzad of Herat, from tropical volcanoes to double star systems, from Galapagos Hawks to Sumatran Butterfly Fish, and from African kingdoms to pre-Socratic philosophers. The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, the title poem of which describes the adventures of a man named after a rhumb-line, represents the most recent leg of Alexander’s intellectual voyage.

Like The Stratospheric Canticles, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome begins with a series of short pieces (the best here are “The Bedouin Ark” and “A Nexus of Phantoms”), followed by a long poem. In the latter, Alexander uses a hunter of sea-snakes named Loxodrome to evoke the universe of the Indian Ocean (an ocean which, from Camoens to Muyaka bin Hajji, is almost conspicuous for the poetry it has inspired). The result is nearly seventy pages long —the longest poem Alexander has written to date — describing peoples and mythologies, geology and marine biology, constellations (Monoceros the Unicorn, Vulpecula, Microscopium, Ophiuchus the Serpent Holder), meteorology, and the art of navigation. The hunter, who is adrift between worlds, and who must wrestle with deadly reptiles in order to extract their venom, is also, of course, a symbol of the poet.

Throughout The Sri Lankan Loxodrome the author relies on his usual verbal techniques;

language itself is uranic in Alexander’s writing, and he strives for a diction as elevated and exotic as his subject matter —a diction propelled by the beauty of scientific words, and which recalls a passage from MacDiarmid’s The Kind of Poetry I Want: “Shirokogoroff’s Psychomental Complex of the Tungus; (If that line is not great poetry in itself then I don’t know what poetry is.)”

For Alexander, knowledge is an “alchemical operation, rather than an isolated expertise.” His principle technique is the generation of startling word combinations and metaphors, which, though frequently unintelligible, produce a sense of exalted strangeness unlike anything else in English. At times these constructions take the form of elaborate, nested metaphors that, in an odd way, resemble the extended kennings of skaldic poetry —except that, in the place of Snorri’sEdda, Alexander draws his tropes from the whole gamut of human sciences and cultures. More frequently, however, he seems to favor the invention of extravagant images, as in the opening of “The Optic Wraith”:

Her eyes
like a swarm of dense volcano spiders
woven from cold inferno spools

This technique varies considerably in effectiveness, though The Sri Lankan Loxodrome is mercifully free of the less felicitous formulations that would sometimes appear in his earlier work, like the “shredded mongoose vacuums” of his poem “Body as Vertiginous Lumen” — a line which reminds one of the famous Song dynasty poet Zhang Zhu, whose phrase “The Cataclysm of Red Sheep,” (or, more literally, the Red Sheep Disaster) has yet to be explained. The sometimes excessively lurid epithets found in his polemical poems, such as “Albania and the Death of Enver Hoxha” or “Haiti”, are also absent here. Unfortunately, though The Sri Lankan Loxodrome is relatively free of weak passages, it is not, however, one of Alexander’s strongest efforts, and never quite reaches the heights of The Stratospheric Canticles, or Exobiology as Goddess. Of course, with a poet like Alexander, this variation in quality is as trivial as it is inevitable, and to criticize him for it seems a little like censuring Cook or Ibn Battuta for the portions of their travels that one finds less interesting — line by line, poem by poem, his work astounds with the thrill of vicarious discovery.