A forsythia bush starts talking in Alan Britt’s poem “Anxious Autumn,” advising us to serve despair with a side of mashed potatoes and “with a generous fist of black pepper,/ thereby stimulating intelligence/ from this beastly emotion.” This comes in the midst of a sequence of poems written just after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for Britt’s new book Alone With the Terrible Universe (Cypress Books), and it reminds us how deeply the otherworldly events and surreal despair of that month penetrated into our everyday lives—so much so that suburban shrubbery chattered about food as therapy.

Reisterstown’s Britt, who teaches at Towson University, is one of three Maryland poets whose new books capture this intermingling of the extraordinary and the ordinary, the mad and the mundane, the weird and the normal. Baltimore’s Chris Mason, who teaches in the city’s public schools, shouts hosannas to such seemingly commonplace subjects as beer, grass, and farts as if they were sacraments in his book Hum Who Hiccup (Narrow House). Terence Winch, currently a Silver Spring resident who recently retired from the Smithsonian Institution, describes how the seemingly stable architecture of one’s own home can allow dreams and water to seep in through cracks in the foundation, where one can wake up, as his new title puts it, Falling Out of Bed in a Room With No Floor (Hanging Loose Press).

There are poets who can provide startlingly vivid descriptions of the world outside our skin, and there are poets who can invent entirely new worlds to explain the turmoil inside their skin. But Britt, Mason, and Winch have a rare gift for showing us how those two worlds can coexist in the same reality—as they do for almost every reader.

Britt begins many of his poems as if he were just another skillful nature poet, describing the autumn oranging of the maple trees just beyond the cedar latticework of his Baltimore County patio. In his best poems, however, tumbling skyscrapers and crumbling hopes intrude. A poem may begin with “Two squirrels drop maple seeds,” but soon those “ribbed pods . . . resemble the primordial ashes of our ancestors.” Another poem may begin, “September has thick, emerald hair,” only to end, “September leans on a split-rail fence/ and watches yellow leaves/ sail by in a swirling gust of ashes.”

Britt makes allusions to Bob Dylan, Paco de Luca, and the late Maryland guitarist Roy Buchanan in these poems, and there is a musical flavor to Britt’s diction. Winch name-drops Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, and Van Morrison in his book, and as co-founder of the notable Irish-American folk band Celtic Thunder, knows how to write a singable lyric (our governor’s Irish-rock band, O’Malley’s March, has recorded Winch’s “In Praise of the City of Baltimore”). Mason too is a musician, co-founder of the Tinklers duo and of the Old Songs trio.

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