Herbert Marder
Cornell University Press ($35)

by Carolyn Kuebler

In his "Prelude" to The Measure of Life, Herbert Marder tells a story about his "somewhat offbeat" decision, as a graduate student at Columbia in the '60s, to write his thesis on Virginia Woolf's novels. Woolf, who wasn't yet part of the standard college syllabus, was also out of political favor at the time, known mainly as an upper-middle-class "lady" who wrote beautiful, experimental novels. But explaining to his advisor that "there are subversive, radical ideas all over her books," Marder won his approval and began an important chapter in his own writing life. His first book, Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf, was published in 1968; now, thirty years older himself, he presents a picture of Woolf in her fifties. "I felt that the enlightened Virginia of the 1930s, who displayed great sanity and courage under fire (her decision to choose the time and manner of her death did not diminish that), required a biography of her own."

Despite her highly charged, standard-syllabus feminist essays, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, Woolf is better known for her radical style than her subversive political ideas. She broke many rules, and did so beautifully, but her characters (and she herself) were mostly polite and well-behaved society people, much of the outrage and rebellion taking place under the surface. Marder doesn't deny Woolf's poetic capabilities and achievements, nor does he argue in favor of her lesser-known novels, those she wrote during her last ten years. What he shows us is how Woolf's always-powerful sense of anger at political and social injustices grew more and more urgent as she grew older, and how she grew increasingly desperate to manifest this rage in her work.

Marder's interest in Woolf's subversive ideas is well-served by a close look at these final years. As Europe was exploding all around her, Woolf found it nearly impossible to maintain her belief in the significance of her art, and as England prepared for war, she felt she was losing her audience. She wanted desperately to have some kind of impact on the world. As Marder remarks, "When reviewers praised the beauty of her writing, ignoring its substance, she protested that she would rather be known as an ugly writer but an honest one." She even broke with her own writerly impulses in an attempt always to try something new, something that might take her work beyond literature itself and into the realm of real-life influence.

Despite Marder's obvious interest in the political side of things, The Measure of Life does not serve a single theme, theory, or agenda. Clearly the author's devotion to Woolf arose from the novels themselves, from her magnificent sentences, and then grew to include the author's lifelong struggle and the way each book fit into her living and breathing beyond the page. Marder pieces together the letters, diaries, and publications into a chronological narrative, resisting the temptation to surmise and editorialize. At the same time, he creates a personal tone that reckons with its own biases and self-interest. He takes care to explain this at the beginning of the book, stating his purpose and intent: "I vowed to respect the otherness of my subject, to listen to what Virginia Woolf actually said rather than what one expected her to say. In short, to believe her . . . to rely on her own testimony and to trace the self-creating motifs, the core of identity, defined by her own words."

Marder analyzes of each book from this period—The Waves, The Years, The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts—apart from the context of the biography, though always surrounded by it. He provides a sort of Cliffs-Notes description of each book, followed by his own assessments; here is where he allows his opinion to come into play most obviously. These moments of subjectivity are well-deserved and often interesting and astute in their particular observations.

The Measure of Life offers a fascinating look at how a writer's raw ideas and her art merge, and also how they fail to. Woolf struggled doggedly in these last years, her work becoming drudgery at times, and her sense of failure increasing. But there was also a lot of delight in her letters and diary entries from these years, and the energy pours forth to her friends, in particular the robust composer Ethel Smyth. "'Only in myself, I say, forever bubbles this impetuous torrent. . . . I am more full of shape & colour than ever,'" she wrote in 1929. While she may have left behind the image of a thin, cold suicidal intelligence, Woolf was actually very passionate, witty, and engaged in the world around her.

Once an author is canonized and beloved as Woolf is, it's hard to imagine her being susceptible to critics, to bad days, to fear of failure. But Woolf was plagued by all these things, completely shaken by negative reviews, or even careless ones, and she was convinced, from time to time, that all of her work was a failure. When it was most devastating was, of course, when she was still in the midst of it, and The Years, which took five years to write, may have been the biggest struggle of all. She wanted to make it different from anything else she had ever written, mostly because she wanted to continue to challenge herself and to have more impact on social reality. Her writing of The Years is the most harrowing segment of this period of her life, up until her suicide. This book, more than any other, wore her out, and in the end she didn't believe in it the way she believed in her more poetic masterpieces, The Waves and To the Lighthouse.

It's also surprising to hear of her less-enviable attributes. Though she was aware that her being a daughter of a famous man of letters and her connections to the powers that be gave her special privileges, even if not a lot of money, she remained an incurable snob. She looked down on poor people, servants, and anyone without the education she had. Some of her remarks, though generally meant only for her diary or for private letters, are disturbingly classist. She may have been active with the Labor Party and written on behalf of less-privileged in Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own, but she had a tenacious sense of pride in her class that bordered on the kind of "barbarism" she herself so hated.

Virginia Woolf's breakdowns, her marriage to the austere Leonard, her connections to the colorful Bloomsbury circle—all of this is well-documented and even mythologized in the hundreds of books on Woolf that have been published since Marder's graduate school days. But Marder's approach, based as it is on her voice rather than on any "thesis," allows the reader to see Woolf's genius, her failures and her passions, as the complex, variegated days of a life. Woolf comes off as a hard-working writer who never rested on her popularity and praise. In this book, Marder moves the last ten years of her life out from under the shadow of her suicide, and respectfully and lovingly puts this productive time into context. Household chatter, visits to the doctor, quibbles with servants, and blossoming friendships may not change Virginia Woolf's literary output or her influence; they do, however, make a good story of artistic struggle, a story worthy of its many retellings.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2000/2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000

Kim Addonizio
Boa Editions ($12.95)

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Kim Addonizio's third collection continues the dialectic of urban despair—the dialogue between bar room and beauty, between sorrow songs and simple prayers—that has earned her a wide readership and many honors. Addonizio's poems depict a landscape of failed relationships, drunken lovers, and barroom drawl. She creates poems of casual formality to reflect the discontinuity and loosely held together lives of her speakers, and often evokes the thoughts and talk of Others—sometimes in the disguise of completely created personas, as in her previous book, the novelesque Rita and Jimmy. Here again in Tell Me are the despairing realities Addonizio so eloquently sings—the dim rooms where strangers meet, the death of parents, a painful sequence on a failed marriage—familiar territory that Addonizio narrates with intelligence and grace. But within Tell Me is also the poet's "fierce love" for her daughter, as well as a new voice—that of the Poet/Teacher who mentions "workshops," "writing," and "teaching"—which haltingly asserts it subject position as if to speak from the actual social role of Addonizio as author.

For previous literary generations, the bar room was a strictly male landscape, but in Addonizio's hands it becomes articulated through the subject position of the female body, and all the complex sexual politic which that voice engenders through hazy smoke and drunken sway. Whether Addonizio speaks of the body through a distancing "you," or "she" or intimates the body through the more immediate "I," in her work the body becomes landscape. She speaks of its "tenacious renewal," of "the tongue dipping into the real," of her "ex husband's hands," an "old intimacy" that evokes such sorrow, until her speaker states with slight awe in the book's last poem, "how images enter you, the shutter of the body." How often and simply this occurs:

clicking when you're not even looking
smooth chill of satin sheets, piano keys, a pastry's glazy crust
floating up.

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Nick Carbo
Tia Chucha Press ($10.95)

by Thomas Fink

The "bare-chested muscled Filipino" Ang Tunay na Lalaki, "the real man" in Tagalog, is a seventies/eighties TV-commercial character transplanted to nineties New York City by Nick Carbo in his engaging second book of poems, Secret Asian Man. The book even comes with its own anticipated review, imagined by Lalaki's "[white] American" fiancee:

"The main Filipino character
is depicted in poignant and hysterical
adventures which inform us about
the complex psyche of a recent immigrant's
postcolonial experience of attempting
to survive in the motherland. However,
the girlfriend-turned-wife is left
as a stick-figure with a nebulous past
and an insipid personality." ("Sally Speaks")

As a "displaced" "postcolonial" subject in a prime metropolitan site of "cultural diversity," Lalaki has his share of "poignant and hysterical adventures"—online, with a character named Orpheus, in "the real" Nick Carbo's poetry workshop, and as a secret agent. These escapades are entertaining. However, the book's significance involves the psycho political conflict between Lalaki's "addiction to New York," including the access to "Americanness" that the not-quite stick figure Sally embodies, and his historically grounded disgust at American racism.

In "Ang Tunay Na Lalaki Considers the Historical Consequences," Carbo adroitly juxtaposes Lalaki's musings on "early anti-miscegenation laws," "a frank" and scandalized "discussion in the mid-1930's by an American judge / in [Time] magazine about the sexual / prowess of Filipino males," and a Filipino-American's apt response to the racist judge that his people, "however poor, are taught / from the cradle up to respect and love [their] women" and thus boast a very low "divorce rate." Carbo's speaker concludes that the white American "myth / of the pin-size Asian penis" stems from this "little threat, perhaps." Lalaki relishes the fact that if he were to marry Sally, "they would be / legally practicing . . . savagely good / café con leche sex with rain forest honey to sweeten / the taste."

Another ironic history lesson appears in "Ang Tunay Na Lalaki Looks at the Early Americans," which traces the causes of "the unending cycle of prostitution to service / Americans which reached its height" recently "with 50,000 precious Filipina prostitutes" at U.S. bases. In "Ang Tunay Na Lalaki Tries to Explain to His Therapist," while covering anti-Native American genocide, black slavery, Manifest Destiny, etc., Lalaki makes a convincing case for his sustained anger, but Carbo implants some subtle ironies—most notably, confusion of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments with the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts. Further, when Lalaki argues that "all your sins seem to be erased from memory, / given scant mention in text books," he ignores the recent textbook-transforming work of historians-of-color (and feminists).

For Lalaki, subtleties of the transitional character of nineties U.S. cultural politics do not jibe with his experience of polarities, as in the AOL Chat Room poem. Learning that Lalaki is Filipino, ClaraB calls him a "mongrel American" and assumes that he is "a SUB." He retorts that his "good manners . . . can be / . . . mistaken for submissive behavior." This poem, showcasing Carbo's experimental side, marvelously juxtaposes fragments of prurient, poignant erotic dialogue with solemn epistemological discourse by philosopher of science Karl Popper. Another superbly ironic poem, "Ang Tunay Na Lalaki Lies on the Bed," describes how Sally uses Lalaki as the nude, urinating, masturbating, cringing subject—more properly, object—of a film, replete with images and "racist songs" from the Philippine-American War, that garners an NEA grant.

Although Lalaki's workshop poems, "Sally's Resume" (yes, literally), and a clinical report on Lalaki's sleep apnea are far less effective as poetry than other texts, they offer raw documentation that enriches the collagistic texture and thickens the plot of Secret Asian Man, which stands as a narrative unfolding of Lalaki's hybrid destiny and his representation by self and other.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2000/2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000

Michael Heffernan
Salmon Publishing / Dufour Editions ($12)

by Will Clemens

Another Part of the Island is the sixth book of poems from Michael Heffernan, whose Love's Answer won the 1993 Iowa Poetry Prize. With 31 poems comprising 43 pages, Another Part of the Island may look and feel like a chapbook. Published overseas, where Heffernan co-directs the International Writers' Course at the National University of Ireland, Galway, it could be as difficult to find as a chapbook. But this small, unassuming book reads more as a complete collection of poems, several ranking among the strongest in Love's Answer, which poet X.J. Kennedy hailed as "the best book yet by one of the very best poets we have."

As readers might expect with a book of poems published in Ireland, Another Part of the Island evokes Irish settings in superb auditory and visual imagery, as in "Another Story,"

when the robe of sky droops heaviest

over the gray-blue slopes of Mullaghmore
and the black choughs come coughing out of the wind

Yet poems set in different places establish a belief that travel not only enriches the intellect with other cultures and geographies but has the power to heal a bored, grief-stricken, or wounded psyche. In "Garbology," a voice from Greenbriar Avenue in Elkins, Arkansas, where Heffernan lives, half-humorously announces:

Most of our excitement here in the Subdivision
happens on Wednesdays when the garbage truck
hauls off the stuff we don't need anymore

The three-part "The Night Breeze Off The Ocean" tells the story of a man who, grieving over his mother's death, discovers a moment of solace with a Belgian girl on a spontaneous trip to Dar-es-Salaam. In "Liberty," a slightly rhymed sonnet, a man deals with the end of a love affair by leaving the State in his car.

There are other moments when Heffernan journeys through the landscapes of dream-states and memory, as in "The Land of the Blind," where "the one-eyed man is invisible," "asking directions to the road out of town," or "Detroit," where the speaker, younger, tries to understand what Patsy Doherty's breasts are thinking, and concludes "The mind is its own place."

Another Part of the Island is, finally, even more than a collection of poems about the importance of these physical and imaginative travels to places for healing. It is a book that builds a bridge between the literary writer and the people's poet. Heffernan pits his insightful thoughts on Dante, Shakespeare, Henry James, and others against his valuable experiences with friends and family, discussing, for example, "the hearts of even the old ones at the bar," "his wife and children sleeping in," or, as in a handful of minor poems like "Forecast," "nothing but the weather."

With his senses tuned to all these different kinds of people, places, and things, not to mention his mastery of the best language to render them in a range of forms (from the Petrarchan sonnet "Two Solitudes" to the ghost of meter in the title poem), Heffernan gives us a slim book that is as the "mud on a boot" it so vividly portrays.

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Sharon Doubiago
West End Press ($19.95)

by Michael McIrvin

Why write history and facts and story and autobiography in poetry? "Poetry is the true revolution," Rimbaud says, "that will end the discord between history and idea." —Sharon Doubiago

Pound famously defined epic as the "tale of the tribe," and just as famously we stopped believing him sometime after mid-century—feminists especially, who rightfully noted that any meta-narrative is an assertion of control, that Odysseus's rage, for example, is codified as a masculine value and therefore perpetuated. Consequently, the field of human action that is history dissolved to a mere rumor in our poetry; and the human speaker as a dynamic and self-conscious product of, that omnivorous force turned inscrutable cipher for nothing more than a myopic self, as if being-in-time were being-in-a-vacuum. Which is a delusion, of course, and a denial of responsibility, but more of this in a moment.

Although our fear of language as a means of control is justified, the elision of history as a response is simplistic and in actuality an acquiescence to the pathetic way-things-are, to the diminishment of human meaning and the attenuation of identity, presently a mere marker for a set of values defined by the marketplace: a demographic representation, the member of a target audience, some modicum of market share to be aimed at, corralled, controlled.

Sharon Doubiago's Hard Country, originally published in 1982 and, thankfully, recently reprinted with a new insightful afterword, represents a much more courageous response to the conundrum of the meta-narrative: the need to speak our time in order to understand it and to change it despite our fear of enshrining a set of values that must be subscribed to. What Doubiago knows is that to speak is to participate in the enterprise that is Western Civilization, frequently even against our will in as much as we must use the language of the fathers and risk our own words being turned on us; conversely, she knows that to remain silent is to abdicate the poet's primal responsibility: to bring to the level of attention what we incipiently know about the world and thereby to forge a viable self that a reader can interact with and explore in order to achieve a momentary viability him/herself.

What Doubiago knows is that we carry history around as a trace in our bodies which is manifested as both a dream and, for the descendants of the conquerors, a grief we can barely survive. For her, the very ground we walk is filled with bones from which ghosts rise to haunt the real epic of our time and place, as opposed to the innocuous and apologetic shades that fill the anti-epic of mass media. It is a burden-almost-unbearable, and perhaps another reason less courageous poets of the present have ducked the responsibility of history altogether.

Doubiago says, as she walks the streets of Cody, Wyoming on her journey across America, as she walks the remains of the frontier West where our ancestors took what they wanted and left only dry corners in which the aboriginals beg and weep and drink themselves to death:

The last time I opened to the fuck of history it broke me from the man I love and the time before that it broke me from my art.

.....................................

and when [I] . . . heard the earth crying Viet Nam I took a vow never to be a poet

...

because I was taught the law and order of poetry and saw my brother become a killer as he obeyed the law and order of the Army. I was taught the words of a woman are almost worthless.

...

because art I was taught is too delicate to sing of genocide. But what else could I sing while people were being murdered in my name?

The conundrum is real, to speak with all its attendant risk or to remain silent, but there is really only one answer. For genocide is but the crime leading a long dark list, and if the poet does not speak this negativity, then he/she lies and thus participates in the status quo without meaning to. And the result of silence is self poisoning. Doubiago says later in the same poem:

. . . I understood years in my wild places writing is a physical act, erotic and dangerous, the lowering of the self into a well almost too deep. I must bring up the words or perish from their rot left inside.

("Wyoming")

This is the poet's impossible imperative, to tell the truth to the degree he/she can apprehend it in an age when the truth is diminished, or stolen and transformed, even as it is spoken. In short, the poet must endlessly offer up correction and emendation.

What Hard Country deftly enacts, however, is not merely the writer's role inflecting history as it is played out in her own psyche, but the map of that psyche itself and how it is emblematic and individual at once. The poet can say in the poem "Headstone," as she recognizes the necessary polyvocality of the tale of the tribe:

I understand we come from a truth we each wholly and separately possess to a particular house and street and time to tell the story only our body knows and our tragedy will be we will not tell it well because our witnesses will be telling their stories . . .

but also say,

I am five, I will never understand why we are stranded in our selves but in this moment I know my own story is understanding our singleness that I am destined to move my body and time into the body-time the story of Others.

The true poet's job is not the solipsistic rant of the tiny, alienated "I" of postmodernity, but the exploration of the personal as it bleeds into the inclusive, an exploration that might help us understand our suffering in its context and its complexity.

Doubiago says that as a girl she read books written by men while their women and children slept and vowed to "write books / as the woman awake," as her man and children slept ("Idaho Is What America Used To Be"). And the voice in Hard Country is very much a woman's, the equal of Pound and Williams' voice, and even of Whitman's barbaric yawp at times. And it is stridently the voice of a feminist whereby Hard Country expands the scope of the epic, which will only be complete when the race achieves radical equivocity, that hopeless dream. Herein lies the poet's greatest responsibility of all: not everyone can speak for him/herself due to lack of skill, lack of opportunity, or lack of privilege. Therefore the poet's hyper-literacy is a gift he/she owes the world.

In a fit of Whitmanic transcendence, Sharon Doubiago:

I see a dirt road inside myself and on it I am walking. At the far end where the sun is setting are my children, all the western scattering of my flesh.

Here are the voices I hear, the unaccountable melancholy, the dark hearts of my grandparents, storied in my flesh. When I look to the hills I hear shattering like glass, the red in the loam soaked from me.

Near the cabin at the clearing's center I hear a mournful Scottish melody. When I walk amidst flowering dogwood a thousand tongues lift their words to me.

Call my name in the act of love. I am full of loss and the shadowy Cherokee. At night I fall into our migrations, settlers drifting across the Great Barrier.

The cold winters you say, the loss of war paint, the images tattooed on the skin of my brain. My daughter in the river we drink, its body lifting her before she knew the body of a man.

When you call me, your face, bald as the eroded hills, is blessedly here, between me and these scenes. But when we ride the boy in your scrotum, which stores, like glass, the ruins of this place, you pull houses full of blood, mountains full of smoke, down on top of me.

("Appalachian Song")

The dead and the dispossessed speak in and through the poet and for a moment we are at home here, among the ruins. The ground may be stolen, but all those who have passed are present, whispering the truth of who we are, a truth without which the tribe cannot long survive.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2000/2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000

John Ash
Talisman House ($14.95)

by Robert Kelly

It is a curious thing that travel literature embraces two utterly different, incompatibly opposite sorts of text: those that illuminate jungle pathways and sea voyages, huge tense or flabby deeds of getting there, and those quieter texts that exult in the amenities—or writhe beneath the discomforts—of being there.

A writer might well be enraged to find his new book of poems cross-listed under "Travel," even though texts in it seem to play out in Asia or the Mediterranean. John Ash's new book, however, unabashedly avows a poetry of being there—in Anatolia.

We call it Turkey, this strange land of Ash's sojourn, though I don't think he does. The country he moves in does not seem one of nowadays, not the Turkey of the Kurdish War or even of this century, Turks and Armenians, Turks and Germans, Turks and Jews. He seems closer to a Kavafis-like sense of time, or timelessness, as if in the sensuous detail of one afternoon we really can recover all of history, all the vexed kings and invaders, all the sly lovers and their vine-dazzled ruses. The title poem at the outset—wielding the longest lines of any in the book—shows this trust and his skill at their strongest.

Anatolia has long been a favorite place for Anglophone wanderers—I found myself thinking back several decades to Lord Patrick Kinross's accounts of his Turkish travels where naughtiness and wit mingle with precise observation. John Ash seems no stranger to that world, though his aims, and achievements, seem quite different: calme, luxe et volupté among the olive groves, the delicate whiff of diesel busses passing, oil slicks on the Sea of Marmara, a quiet, desperate holding to what is there.

These poems believe intensely in the world they bear witness to. That is the first thing we notice, I suppose, that we are reading texts of a believer. (Travelers, like theologians, come skeptical or credulous.) So vividly do they believe in the happenstance they behold that at times they go for quiet, unemphatic ways of talking, perfectly registered, when a more anxious traveler might press harder with description.

Robbed stone, ashlar.
Stacked reeds and sherds.

Cattle skirting the edge of the marsh,
whisking their tails against flies.

Then too, that same believingness seems to mark the persons who live in the poems, and most of all, the I-figure whose doings monopolize most of the syntactical operations of the book. They are not, ‘I' am not, described. They are the givens, the actors, pronoun-bearing shadows moving through a bright landscape. Where Bashô shows us everything he sees and we wind up remembering only the mind of Bashô, Ash shows us Ash beholding, and we remember, sometimes with a curious tenderness, the things he gives us to see. Strange, the contrariness of poetry.

Sometimes Ash is pretty prosy in his ways when narration replaces observation (as in the later sections of "The Tour"), especially when history with a capital H is at stake, but by and large he is able to cluster material musically before us, close to the ear. And he seldom makes us conscious of his verbal logic; we tend to accept his imagistic invention as if it were simply just more evidence.

What interests me most in this collection of graceful scenes and interviews is the quiet way, that word again, John Ash develops his own sort of poetics of information. It seems to me that such a poetics—be it Pound, Olson, Allen Fisher, Cage, Kenneth Irby—is the notable achievement of our post-narrative age, the ability of verse to handle huge tracts of stuff from our slaughterhouse of data, and bring them to shape, sense, social fact: where information becomes the in-forming of society. Ash can move from the vernacular to the formal very smoothly, can sound a little like Pound, or Kavafis, or even (as in "Language Poem: 2000 BC-2000 AD") like Olson written by Rexroth. The man's own voice is secure enough to allow these gestures, almost playful reminders of how other poets have been battered by this material, this Anatolia, the Rising Country, the source of the sun. I saw it from the air once, hard and red and barren, the highlands, and felt this was a place that still needs to speak. Ash is more civil than my harsh mountains, but he clearly speaks the place. And that is where travel poem becomes just poem.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2000/2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000

Paul Violi
Coffee House Press ($14.95)

by Fred Muratori

The publication of a Selected Poems is one of the two or three most significant milestones in a successful poet's career. Having a bona fide Selected—thick, filigreed with acknowledgments and dedications—means that you've made it, baby, and even if the poetry in-crowd had never read your work before, they'd damned well better pretend to know it now.

Or at least that's what Selecteds used to mean, before poets and poems swept over the American landscape of bookstores and Web sites like a tide of red ants, choking readers with choice, paralyzing them with product. Lost in this wriggling armada of indistinguishably lineated texts, a Selected is lucky to catch the heat ray of a mischievous critic's magnifying glass. But if you squint, you can almost make out Paul Violi's Breakers among the masses: it's the "one ant dancing with a dead ant in the sand."

A Paul Violi poem is like no one else's. Combining professorial erudition with the relaxed unpredictability of Frank O'Hara, the shadowy wisdom of Rimbaud, and the urban angst of Jerry Seinfeld, Violi's poems make you laugh out loud, then think really hard about what it is you're laughing at. They begin as modest eddies, then spiral outward in ever-widening circles to absorb and transform conventions of mass culture rarely incorporated into poetry: the TV program guide, the travel diary, the crossword puzzle. In Violi's hands, these mundane forms become retorts in which language and the cunning unconscious are released rather than imprisoned.

"Wet Bread and Roasted Pearls" illustrates how such borrowed forms can enhance the movement of a poem, allowing it to negotiate multiple planes of perception and rhetoric. It begins conventionally enough with a train ride that unwinds as smoothly and concretely as Philip Larkin's "Here":

Hudson Line. Gravel trackbed
dusted with snow, bank rock and piling
blackened with oil, barges,
half-rotted on granite slabs
where a deer dips her head in bent reeds

and then steps out onto shore ice:
One long wave of white ice
nightwinds caught at its farthest reach
between arrival and return
and held gleaming above the tide.

The speaker regards the actions of the deer as representing universal emotional states—recognition, amazement—much like Chinese ideograms. "Newspaper in hand, he speculates on "the numerous ideograms / for 'To fill in the blanks,'" the most obvious being a crossword puzzle, which, "newspaper / in hand, stultified / by a maze of blanks," he just happens to be mulling over:

One across: To be reasonably
suspicious of zeros and words
that contain too may os.

Two across: Prosopopoeia.

Fifty-five down: Monotonous.

Three across: Puzzle is to Mystery
as Grapefruit is to . . .

Five across: Rhymes with orange.

But this is only one passage embedded in a larger narrative that snakes outward to the tangible world, then inward toward reserves of memory, drawing on the crossword puzzle as a rhetorical armature to hold and schematize personal remnants of the past: ". . . ground // now as blank as Eight down, / the winter you decided / to freeze me out, kept / the house as cold as a morgue."

The cleverness and grace of passages like this are expertly molded and certainly admirable, but where is the iridescent humor and flesh-tingling irony Voili's readers have learned to expect? Where is "Scatter," one of the liveliest poems to ever grace a Best American Poetry anthology? Or "Errata," the inventive checklist of wild printer's errors that ends 1993's The Curious Builder? Or Violi's ransom note, titled "Tanka," also from The Curious Builder, written in that delicately jarring haiku-like form ("Where the blossoms fall / like snow on the dock / bring fifty thousand in cash // or you'll never see / your baby again")? You'll have to buy the earlier collections for those, since the eight long poems and series that comprise Breakers seem marshaled to emphasize Violi's more meditative side, as if length alone carried with it an intrinsic weight or claim on high seriousness.

Appearing more jotted down than written, "Harmartan" is a fifty-plus page travel diary recording the poet's time in Nigeria during the 1960s. You won't find this kind of information in the National Geographic or on the Discovery Channel, as Violi enumerates the quotidian collisions of poverty, politics, and perseverance, the wrenching contradictions of a nation-in-progress, with an almost journalistic detachment. "Sputter and Blaze" comes off as a dreamy chunk of late-Romantic reverie so deliberately paced, so ethereal in its extended metaphors of silence and light, that you nearly forget it's set in a propeller factory. Even "Triptych," which takes the form of a day's offbeat TV schedule, can transmit an unexpected gravity in its summaries of programs like "MODERN EXPLORATION" ("Spaces in the / air where the / wind waits / disguised as / silence.") and "KARMA "("The live / leafless / branches and the / dead tree / against the sky, / all grappling / with the wind."). Thank goodness "BITCH ON WHEELS," "MOSTLY PROSE" ("A / bug flies / through my eye. / The crowd / cheers."), and others add the signature Violi zest.

Unfortunately, the major comic enterprise included here, "King Nasty," makes its point in the first page or two, but struggles on for another fifteen. Written in the voice of a hot-shot Hollywood player spelling out every detail of his vision for a movie about an executioner in Revolutionary Paris ("Maybe we got a play here. / Or convert it into an opera. / A Musical. Or all three."), it seems to urge itself grudgingly forward until the campy absurdity of anyone's wanting to produce such a bad film begs the question of why anyone would want to read such a long poem about producing such a bad film.

But "King Nasty" is the only serious misstep in an otherwise provocative and obliquely engaging collection. Not many poets can get away with a line like "You can have your snake and egret too," but after the chuckle comes the realization of how perfectly the line functions within the context of the poem, how succinctly it encapsulates the moral fable it concludes. Having published exclusively with small presses, Paul Violi has suffered too low a profile in the poetry world for three decades—our age does not appreciate satirists unless they host talk shows—and one can only wish that Breakers will at last initiate his breakthrough.

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Teresa Porzecanski
University of New Mexico Press ($17.95)

by Jay Miskowiec

Uruguayan writer Teresa Porzecanski embodies a lesser-known facet of the Latin American experience: the Jewish immigrant living amidst the continent's staunch Catholicism and Indo-African cultures. Raised in Montevideo the daughter of both Ashkenazim and Sephardim parents, she grew up in a polyglot world of Spanish, Yiddish, Arabic and German.

A teacher in Sun Inventions (1982) struggles to get her students to ask, "What elements are necessary to elaborate the interior structure of a thing?" But the author's own unsure strategies for pursuing this investigation leave the text uneven. The story meanders from straightforward prose to magic realism, where objects have a life or essence of their own, to a Sollers-like style of long run-on sentences:

. . . always be concise clear and simple, clear simple and concise, that is, never any ambiguous answers don't admit contradictions or opposition the third caveat is the key to locking up the Universe and shutting up yourself inside of that which you know with all assurance of begin able to explain the elements by the simple movement of shifting your position inside the established scheme of things very important don't forget schemes never be vague reduce the complex to the simple . . .

The next sentence after this muddle says "everything else is word play." And that's the weakness here. As Henry James might say, Porzecanski tells us, she doesn't show us, in her words "the symbol of other worlds fallen from an ancestral and already exiled paradise."

Perfumes of Carthage (1994) relates the lives of the Mualdebs, a Sephardim family living in Uruguay during the 1930s, and that of their servant Angela Tejara, a descendent of African slaves. Characters live between reality and myth, but always in the diaspora. Traveling back and forth over time, the matriarch Nazira sees herself in ancient Ur walking through "forbidden gardens . . . laid to waste by the expulsion of all humanity." One of her daughters will envision the voyage to the Americas over the seas that seemed "the waters of an ancient flood, still-turbulent waters bearing memories of the first global destruction."

Porzecanski illustrates well here how this sense of exile is central to both Jewish and Afro-American identity. Angela is also transported back to her ancestral homeland; she sees images, hears voices, feels the presence of wild animals. The din grows louder until she is caught up in the whirl of dancers who invoke the tribe's spirits, "attempting to reincarnate them, bring them back to life."

This story comes closer to finding that "place where everything had already been said."

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Edited by Sheree R. Thomas
Warner Books ($24.95)

by Rudi Dornemann

Anthologies have long been important in science fiction and fantasy. Whether pulling together previously published stories or actively soliciting new work, editors can try to shape genre development by spotlighting groups of writers or kinds of writing, as Harlan Ellison did in his Dangerous Vision series in the ’60s or Pamela Sargent in her Women of Wonder collections in the ’70s.

With Dark Matter, editor Sheree R. Thomas sets out "to offer readers an enjoyable entreé to the diverse range of speculative fiction from the African diaspora and to encourage more talented writers and scholars to explore the genre." Her particularly rich and diverse collection accomplishes this and more with non-realistic fictions (and a few essays) by a cross-generational group of authors from the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean and Britain. Thomas includes authors who are well established in speculative fiction, such as Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due—but she also pulls in writers who aren't usually thought of as writing in the speculative genres, such as Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed. There are new stories, many seeing their first printing here, and there are older stories as well, going back to a Charles W. Chesnutt story from 1887.

Dark Matter also offers a great variety in the worlds imagined and in the storytelling approaches that bring us into those worlds, from the fairly straightforward speculation of Evie Shockley's "separation anxiety" to the near-surreal future of Akua Lezli Hope 's "The Becoming" to the dream-intense synesthesia of Kalamau ya Salaam's "Buddy Bolden." Nalo Hopkinson, a fast-rising star on the science fiction scene, contributes two quite different stories, one drawing on Caribbean lore, the other delving into technologically augmented sex. Many of Dark Matter's stories are unique enough that they might well serve as the seeds for new speculative subgenres—there's African sword and sorcery by Charles R. Saunders, a black reimagining of vampirism by Jewelle Gomez, and science fiction cross-referenced with political and legal reality by Derrick Bell.

In his essay "Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction," Charles R. Saunders writes, "After all, if we don't unleash our imaginations to tell our own sf and fantasy stories, people like [white writer of science fiction set in future African societies] Mike Resnick will tell them for us. And if we don't like the way he's telling them, it's up to us to tell them our own way." His call to action echoes Chinua Achebe's Home and Exile, in which the renowned Nigerian author speaks at length of the need for African writers to write their own stories. There is happily a good deal of this taking place—editor Thomas is currently soliciting submissions for a second volume of Dark Matter.

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Anne Enright
Atlantic Monthly Press ($24)

by Amy Halloran

What Are You Like? is the first novel published in America by BBC Radio journalist Anne Enright, and it is gruelingly beautiful. "She was small for a monster, with the slightly hurt look that monsters have and babies share, the same need to understand," begins the book, dismissing sentimentality and straightforward storytelling in one fell swoop. If you like twisted tellings of truths to be unwound over the course of a couple hundred pages, this book will pull you from sleep in the middle of the night and ask you to read it until, confused and disturbed, you can fight for sleep again.

"What are you like?" is a turn of phrase that means more in Ireland and England than it does in the U.S. The book reveals the title's context and double meaning. "What are you like?" the monster baby asks herself in the mirror when she's a woman, looking for herself in New York. "What am I like?" Evelyn, the monster baby's stepmother, asks herself and her stepchild while trying on clothes in a shop in Dublin." The stepmother is worrying what kind of substitute mother she offers the girl, but also, she is quizzing how she looks, in a kind of a put-down: how dare she look good in clothes? "No, it's lovely," her step-daughter Maria reassures her. What Maria thinks of the other meaning of the question we don't know, because what we know of Maria is limited by her own limitations; the grown up baby can't outgrow her monstrosities because she feels an overwhelming lack of self-knowledge.

The language Enright uses is stunning enough to be almost untrustworthy. The book flows smoothly into the reader, pouring its characters' discomforts like free shots at a bar. After a few rounds, the discerning drinker will wonder about the bartender's intentions. Is the desire to create empathy actually establishing distance? "The secret places of my wife," thinks Maria's mother, who literally eats words, who wears her clothes inside out. "She was a woman who mistook sex for everything else." "She drank until she was the smallest thing in the room, every organ in her body small and hard and old." "She had a violent need for fried eggs." Mostly, the poetry of Enright's prose is effective, but sometimes it is only affected, leaving the reader to wonder about a string of words. Did they describe an object or action or skirt it, by sheer description?

This is especially evident while Maria is in New York City. Her search for self leads to a nervous breakdown whose narration is laborious and stretches over too many pages. The tricks of phrase are taxing. Although they seem to serve a purpose, writing a trail of breadcrumbs to feed the reader who may not have witnessed a breakdown, personally or otherwise, reading Maria's dissolution is eventually boring. Still the book does not lose the reader, because most of us don't know who we are. Maria's sense of dislocation, even without the backdrop of New York City, is familiar to modernity. The quest for identification and identity are extreme in her instance, however, and the unveiling of her family secrets is well worth weathering the difficult middle for the overall pleasure of the read.

Anne Enright has a book of stories, The Portable Virgin and a novel, The Wig My Father Wore, both available across the Atlantic ocean. Hopefully What Are You Like? will gain her an American audience that will demand stateside releases of those titles. If this novel is representative of Enright's fiction, her writing is pithier and more intelligent than much of what is billed as contemporary literature in American and British publishing. Certainly, it is leagues beyond Bridget Fielding and for that reason alone, deserves reading in this country.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2000/2001 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2000