If poetry volumes were ranked like ski slopes, I'd list Mary Jo Bang's The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans as a black diamond: it's not for the poetry beginner. Bang has some exquisite lines, and if you like associative poetry, you'll adore her. On the other hand, the poems can feel frustratingly internal, like they're designed for a club of insiders to which you, the reader, may or may not belong. This may be the kind of book that makes non-poetry-readers decide to stay non-poetry-readers.

Reading this book is like looking through a kaleidoscope. The world appears in stunning fragments: vivid colors, absurd juxtapositions, occasionally something recognizable in the shifting jumble. Depending on my mood I found Bang's kaleidoscope either exhilarating or frustrating. Sometimes the poems flowed in through my eyes and exited, uncomprehended, through the back of my head.

I should be up-front and admit that associative poetry is not my favorite thing. The poets to whom I most often return are primarily narrative poets — Jane Kenyon, Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye. Bang's style is about as far from these poets as one can get.

If you enjoy Lucie Brock-Broido or John Ashbery, you'll probably like Mary Jo Bang. Like their poems, Bang's poems reward a slant-reading. Let the delicious images and phrases wash over you; let whatever elements seem meaningful be meaningful; but don't try to force the poems into the kind of narrative sense you may be accustomed to finding.

To ground my comments, here's one of Bang's poems in its entirety.

Head-Heavy on Its Snakestalk, the Tulip

Agile in motion — but glacial, too syrup to see…
Or a salt, caustic and small scale, leans to an edge —
Water perhaps, or a quarry dressed in dovegray and pinstripe.
(I wished for that edge once. And more. Then not. For a while.)

Between us, there was always white flannel or any old thing:
Why I only wear this when I don't care how I look.
This said, then the hair not so much tossed as…
The hair flipped, small-scale, mannered.

We show our true selves: naked, skin gently rewound,
circuits exposed, minor quibbles
a clock will iron smooth. Decisions: whether dessert
with the meal. Or shortly thereafter. Wanting it all. At once.

Something between us. Water, a caustic salt.
Not so much tossed as flicked from the shoulder
with the back of a hand. Impossible to show the true self,
while turning a head. Why, I only wear this

when I don't care how I look. Agile in motion. Imponderable:
water, truth, naked, rewound. Tuliplike. Leans to an edge
but never loses control. Or leans, and falls.
Then rises. No, rose. No end.