cover image The Legend of Light

The Legend of Light

Bob Hicok. University of Wisconsin Press, $19.95 (79pp) ISBN 978-0-299-14910-9

``Memories often link umbiblically,'' Hicok says in ``Memory,'' a poem that captures the unconsciousness of some remembered responses: his two childhood distastes (``siamese tortures'') for the Road Runner and having to catch his father's ``psychotic'' knuckleball connect to ruminations about an innocent man's ineradicable memories of imprisonment after his release from jail. With unadorned directness, Hicok details quotidian events: he sees a mother strike her child in the car waiting next to his at an intersection, notes the woman's instantaneous regret which is expressed in a hug that holds that car in place long after the light changes and he drives on. Hicok's lines move quickly, depicting a vision that doesn't seem to miss a thing but is able to see surprising wholes made up of parts. This collection of accomplished, un-self-conscious work was selected for the 1995 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry by Carolyn Kizer. (Nov.)