In his third book, Twice Removed, Ralph Angel writes moodscapes, extremely distilled poems infused with feeling but removed from the triggering subject. The book, his first since winning the prestigious James Laughlin Award for Neither World in 1995, is full of small to medium size (two pages) poems which sometimes feel haunted, occasionally resemble celebrations, and almost always take place in an urban moment.
           Many poems are infused with a reflective quiet taking place in the shadow of some ambiguous shame or loneliness. No, aloneness. Angel’s silence is the silence of an urban and urbane house,

I miss you too…Today the quiet

slams down …It’s all so tidy,
a fire in the living room,

a rug from Greece,

Persian rugs and pillows…

Or it is the quiet of the a city, where "we must have made a mess of things again…In vain a shrieking siren repeats itself/ and fades. The quiet idles there, a crosswalk signal chirping." His physical descriptions keep pain or longing from overwhelming the poem. The world mundanely continues despite one’s mood and "the pieces scatter and/rearrange without much fanfare or notice." And unlike the deep imagist’s trap of taking the quotidian moment and "leaping" into the poem’s psychological state, Angel’s emotive lines are interlaced with his descriptions so the mood does not feel false:

I watched my pain ease between spaces of the air itself.
Watched a waiter fidget with his apron, a woman selling lilacs,
           arranging cans. Strangers, their footsteps, as if

the soul were buoyed there, moist and leafy, a shadowed street
           where fruit rots in a wooden crate. (from Untitled)

          Most startling is the way Angel removes the poems from their originating subjects and strips down the language to increase the their immediacy. The reader is given a mood without the mood’s reference point, the way most us experience feeling. Only in therapists’ offices and narrative do we work out the causes of a feeling. Take a look at the opening stanza from the opening and title poem of the book, "Twice Removed":

Not even sleep (though I’m ashamed of that too).
Or watching my sleeping self drift out and kick harder, burst
           awake, and then the nothing,
leaf—shadow, a shave and black coffee, I know how a dream sounds.

Never does Angel reveal the cause of the shame. Instead he moves us deeper into the poem by alternating a wild image, "holes open up a sky/no thicker than cardboard" with an emotive line "You, the one I’d step over. You, whom I care for / and lie to…" Angel is writing a new form of narrative; a sequence of events occurring in a moment but with no narrative cartilage or subject matter beyond lyric mood. Similes and metaphors prefaced by "like" or "as" are almost non-existent. When they do appear–"Today the quiet // slams down/gently, like drizzled // lightening, / leafless trees"–they never overwhelm the poem.
           Angel places a huge amount of trust in his readers to see that instead of trying to capture one story on a street corner, he’s trying to capture all the stories at once. Poems like "Local Language" are made up of scenes with different characters in each stanza or line. There is a sequence of events but no triggering subject beyond title and tone:

The way she puts her fingers to his chest when she greets him.
The way an old man quiets himself,
or that another man waits, and waits a long time, before speaking.
It's in the gaze that steadies, a music

he grows into _something about
Mexico, I imagine, how he first learned about light there.
It’s in the blank face of every child….

          The reader’s impulse is to put the characters together into a linear narrative when the events in the poem are happening simultaneously. The poem does not make literal sense, but makes an organic, "song" sense. This simultaneous narrative occurs most ambitiously in the small moodscapes that comprise Decalogue, Angel’s homage to Krzystof Kieslowski’s film Decalogue and the third section of the book. They are quiet, touching or quirky individual scenes that some critics have called a misstep. But if read individually, connected only as mood scenes to a landscape, they are wonderful:

A virgin answers all her questions.
He’s in love. She’s experienced. She instructs him.
they are not in her

apartment. their
hands are not caressing. They are not excited
and do not suffer.

And oh how they’ve changed places.

–––––

Nearly every night. For a long time
a small girl screams and
screams.

She will not reveal her nightmare.
Again the light
comes early. On mountains of animals

she sleeps soundly.
And you are frightened too.

          There is a constant wit and sheer delight in the physical world in many of these poems, "The way an old man dabs his wet face/ with a napkin. The way // she reclines when she reads. /So much cinnamon/and bread.//God how I love Darjeeling." Angel reminds us that "the heart’s // not dead" and relief might be "wrapped up in curtains, a different color, /among the railings and the pigeons, the rooftops and / walls— //for all you know it’s a question of bread // or beer." These poems sustain what I call the essential tenderness, a sensitivity, a wonderment and pathos for the world around them. It is hard to deny the delight and wit in lines like these, " My love in the kitchen, airing apples–and why not? why/shouldn’t she? the marvel of her hands, her head tilted /that way. Humming to herself, or dreaming, smiling/when she sees me–."
           Critics have suggested Angel is writing the landscape of Los Angeles, his home. However, there are no Hollywood monuments to distinguish his locales and the poems are never cast in the shadow of Film Noire nor in the blaring light of beach postcards and Snoop Dog videos. There are the "Scissoring palm trees in the gorgeous light above" and "gulls hover offshore and the islands are speckled with fire"–but more often than not his descriptions are balanced, the cities "all mud with light {smog?}" or "brightness // and shadow, deckle-edged, bluer than air–there’s no help // anywhere–you no longer know how to listen..." Angel gives us glimpses of the ocean but it is, "the hollow sound of waves and the shopkeeper sweeping." Rain–Angel is from Seattle–is mentioned more frequently than sunlight, "a slashing rain / and then the moment in traffic when the dull // thud of windshield wipers / wholly isolates you." How many cities in this country–and in the world–get tropical storms and have traffic?  
           Let me come clean. It is time for the proverbial paragraph of criticism, or compliment disguised as criticism. Angel’s missteps are oversteps in attempt to keep the poems from being limited by time or location or character relationship. There are several lines, even a couple individual poems I do not "get." And Angel’s poems don’t give up their secrets. Usually, what comes off as too elusive, too confusing, occurs as part of Angel’s efforts to make the poems have pathos without x and y coordinates.
           Despite the connotations of the phrase "twice removed," there is little in these poems that seems familial. It is more probable Twice Removed refers to the distance from the triggering event. Still, the subject of these poems isn’t exactly the memory–by its nature once removed–of an event, but the feeling after the memory. The subject is mood and mood can happen anywhere, any time. Angel’s voice, like his late friend Linda Hull’s, is a distinct and unusual voice in contemporary American poetics.