Whimsical leaps of logic and faith mark Michael Teig’s wry collection of poems Big Back Yard, winner of the 2002 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His deliberations of human warmth, emptiness, and wonder are captured by conversational jargon, resulting in poems that are at once edgy, charming, and smart. Clever as Dean Young, surreal as Larissa Szporluck, and humbly emotive as Larry Levis, Teig revitalizes the lyric tradition with an alluring inventiveness and breathes life into the volley of first books being published today.
          Teig’s delightfully strange perspective and informal tone pull the reader into his kaleidoscopic world. He begins "Milkweed": "I’ve seen beauty;/ it gets up earlier than me/and makes few decisions." Such anthropomorphic vision serves as a decidedly romantic and optimistic counterweight to his musings of loss and loneliness. He continues:

When night comes a little wind
undresses what’s left of the trees

and it’s easy to forget about
morning and my companions.
I hope they are sleeping.
 
Teig relies on nature as a vehicle through which to simultaneously reveal intimacy and indifference. Reminiscent of Van Gogh’s hallucinatory landscapes, rain, wind, clouds, and birds are the ordinary stuff of life seen through his extraordinary lens. Moving from a spider in the grass, to a three-legged dog, to a description of a neighbor stuffing a scarecrow’s pant leg, Teig’s seeming randomness builds toward a visceral, three-dimensional, aesthetic system. Layer upon layer, Teig depicts moments in time that are oddly beautiful and enchanting.
          His treatment of love and death in "When the Time Comes" demonstrates his technique of handling basic themes with striking images. He begins:

There were nights too when only a radish
lit up the room. I wanted you with me.

I pressed my face to the window
and acres of corn pressed back.

Sentimental subject matter is carefully weighted against the strange glow of a radish and the stoicism of corn, and a marvelous and bizarre love poem is born. "I authored entire encyclopedias/devoted to foreplay. For example,/train tracks in the moonlight are a kind of zipper." With a painter’s eye, Teig creates enticing surfaces that are supported by a skillful and precise infrastructure. That the lovesick narrator is finally reincarnated into a hopeful little girl suggests the speaker wants this narrative of love to belong to someone else, thereby freeing him, or that the speaker wants to be reborn in the shape of his lover. Alas, the poem is a fantastic amalgam of love and loss combined with a dash of Buddhism and the psychedelic body-hopping found in Being John Malkevich.
          The image of the young girl is recycled in "Since We’ve Hardly Met, All This Waving Is a Poor Goodbye" in which the speaker watches a young neighborhood girl: "I thought she was growing beautiful out there/and beyond hope." Although it is unclear whether the speaker is responding to the girl’s apparent hopelessness or his own knowledge that he cannot ultimately love her, he nevertheless imagines they are lovers. Rather than construct a graphic or bawdy love scene, Teig quickly paces his reader through desire, thus illustrating the romantic gesture of imagination overcoming carnal impulse. "I promise if we don’t need food,/we don’t have to get dressed all day./I can make a small boat with my hands." This understated yet visually stunning resolution signifies the narrator’s realization that his fantasy is fleeting. Teig’s readers are thereby left to consider the nature of fantasy as a solitary and momentary act of creation.
          Teig’s panoramic, visual acuity and prodigious sensibility enables us to perceive domestic and pastoral themes with endless variety and surprise. Modest, accessible diction and familiar narrative are juxtaposed by an exquisite and sensual vibrancy. Shifting between the ordinary and extraordinary, readers of Big Back Yard are thereby invited to re-evaluate their own worlds with fresh eyes. Teig is unquestionably a major new talent, a witty and vivacious storyteller in love with life’s luminous details.