Birds of poetry

American Smooth By Rita Dove W. W. Norton. 143 pages. $22.95.

Citizen By Andrew Feld Perennial. 75 pages. $12.95.

The Shadow's Horse By Diane Glancy University of Arizona Press. 58 pages. $15.95.

The School Among the Ruins By Adrienne Rich W. W. Norton. 113 pages. $22.95.

Buffalo Head Solos By Tim Seibles Cleveland State University. 132 pages. $16.

Madness and Retribution By Juliette Torrez Manic Press. 77 pages. $12. 95.

Over the holidays, I took a week's vacation in poetry, enjoying the condensed form, the spun phrase, the out-of-nowhere image.

I'm attracted to it all, but especially to engaged poetry, work that tangles with America or soars above us and spots the glaring error as well as the beauty.

Fortunately, we have two magnificent frigate birds among us, Adrienne Rich and Rita Dove, who are masters at this.

In Rich's latest work, The School Among the Ruins, Bush's Iraq War repeatedly intrudes. Here, for instance, is from "Wait":

   sand screams against your
   government
   issued tent hell's noise
   in your nostrils crawl
   into your ear-shell
   wrap yourself in no-thought
   wait no place for the little lyric.

This book is an ode to solidarity and defiance, and the power of the word: "word and body/are all we have to lay on the line."

All this we've come to expect from Rich, who over a lifetime has devoted herself to laying it on the line. But also to love, lesbian love, which she evokes in subtle, beautiful ways.

   Sleeping with you after
   weeks apart how normal
   yet after midnight
   to turn and slide my arm
   along your thigh
   drawn up in sleep
   what delicate amaze.

The verses Rich dedicates to June Jordan, the poet, essayist, activist, and teacher, who used to write for The Progressive, especially moved me. "The world's quiver and shine/I'd clasp for you forever," Rich writes.

Rich gives her gift of words to us, not knowing ultimately what will become of them or us ("words of the poets tumble/into the shuddering stream"), but hopeful that someone will be on the receiving end to revive this "moribund democracy."

Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winner, offers in American Smooth an astonishing collection that covers race, music, dance, the quality of contentedness in a good marriage, practice at a shooting range, and, like Rich, the power of the word: "We put our thoughts out there on the cosmos express/and they hurtle on, tired and frightened."

The poems on race have a particular urgency. In "Brown," she writes:

   For once I was not the only
   black person in the room
   (two others, both male).
   I thought of Sambo; I thought
   a few other things, too,
   unmentionable here. Don't
   get me wrong." I've always loved
   my skin, the way it glows against
   citron and fuchsia, the difficult
   hues
   but the difference I cause
   whenever I walk into a polite space
   is why I prefer grand entrances....

This poem foreshadows a later one, "Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove," in which the first African American Oscar winner makes a grand entrance of her own.

In a series of poems entitled "Not Welcome Here," Dove writes about black soldiers in World War I and World War II and the treatment they received from their "impertinent nation" upon returning home:

   You didn't want us when we left
   but we went.
   You didn't want us coming back
   but here we are.

Dove can swoop down on one page to capture the common spoken English ("Gee, that sucks") and on the next ascend with an image of a "manicured spider."

No matter the pitch, she pulls it off.

During migration, when there's a storm over the Gulf of Mexico, songbirds gather in astonishing bunches after making landfall. You can find six scarlet tanagers in a single bush, a dozen indigo buntings, and warblers of every stripe.

Here's a few more from 2004 that I identified on holiday.

Citizen, by Andrew Feld

"The one who writes my history will be the one who wears a wire," writes Andrew Feld, in a great opening line to "Zealot." Or, in another: "... God is the name/we give to all the things that scare us most:/how we live, and what happens when we don't."

Feld brings a philosophical mind to the page, and he grounds it in world events, like the Atom bomb, which appears on the very first page and returns in a poem about an uncle who worked on the Manhattan Project.

In "Best and Only," he surveys the twentieth century, with a particular focus on Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo, including a scene with both men urinating off the stern of the Sequoia: "... the president pissing/on the Republic, over which he stands. Exposed ..."

Feld mixes these musings with self-deprecating soul searchings and a reverence for language, as in the closing line of the redemptive last poem: "back to life clothed in new sounds new words."

The Shadow's Horse, by Diane Glancy

The narrator's father worked in the stockyards of Chicago, and many of the most powerful poems in this book relate to that experience. This sampling is from "Remuda":

   In the afterlife the cattle
   lick my father's hand.
   He in turn licks them.
   Here there is further resurrection....
   and somewhere the Holy Ghost
   pulling tongues off the old meat
   carts
   that were first to open the gate.

Other poems touch on the treatment of Native Americans. And throughout, the author arranges and rearranges the metaphor of leaves to sometimes startling effect. Here in its entirety is "The leaves crushed under rake of their moving":

   History (American)
   shoots a pellet--
   to the head
   covers war trails
   massacres
   land allotments
   now re-pile
   the piled leaves
   the leaf piles (of them).
   Restand the fallen
   look at the ground
   beneath
   they are savage
   that dance
   to their tune. "

Buffalo Head Solos, by Tim Seibles

In an "Open Letter" prologue, Seibles champions what he calls a "sublimely reckless poetry," which rebels against "a poetry that doesn't want to be too conspicous, a poetry that knows its place, that doesn't mean to trouble the water, that is always decorous and never stomps in with bad breath and plaid boots."

Seibles troubles the waters.

"It just so happens I am sick/of being Black," Seibles writes, adding a few lines later: "I am sick of being measured/by the nappiness of my head."

Pissed off at racism, fed up with "dumbfuckery," Seibles lets loose here.

Among his targets is TV. In "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers," he writes: "When the televisions came on/you were ready to sit down and watch." As a result, the will to protest atrophied:

   Sometime between civil rights and
   Oprah
   somewhere between Vietnam and
   Desert Storm

   Remember how Baghdad lit up
   that first time--

   all the "sorties, " and here, the
   yellow ribbons--

   Weren't you almost feeling kind of
   glad?

And he gives it to the President in a poem called "For Handsome George," which starts with an epigram from Rumi: "Things are reversed.... One who should be hung is made emperor. People stand and clap." In the body of this poem, Seibles registers his futility:

   When it comes to my country
   I'm like a chipmunk snarling
   at an avalanche, like a dragonfly

   slamming its sharp beak
   into the wilding steel
   of an eighteen-wheeler.

Madness and Retribution, by Juliette Torrez

With a breezy, slangy, playful voice that bespeaks her poetry slam background, Torrez packs a wallop in many of these poems. In "Personal History," she identifies herself as a "norteno" who was New Mexico born:

   bloodlines here long before
   pilgrim's pride manifest destiny
   families escaping with their lives
   from torquernada's questioning.

   And then she delivers the boom:

   spanish was the secret language
   used by adults
   to talk about the war
   where my father was.

In "Red Dress," Torrez writes about a battered wife who attends her husband's funeral in that gaudy attire and throws her wedding ring into the grave, announcing,

   i hope you're happy now
   because I certainly am!

   and all the women silently cheered
   her on
   red dress and all

   while all the men wondered
   what their funerals would be like.

Many of these poems, though, are not nearly so heavy. "Albuquerque," the opening poem, contains this little joke: "How now brown town?" Several deal with seemingly trivial occurrences, like riding a bus when someone stinks up the toilet, or hearing a soundman boast of a date gone wrong.

But Torrez's energy and punch ("blood of Christ is sold by the spoonful") make up for that.

As I took up these and many other works of poetry published in 2004, I was struck by the richness, variety, and vibrancy all around me. Walk in the woods of poetry. See what you can identify.

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.

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