Hands of the Saddlemaker

For the pilgrims that inhabit Samaras's first collection--selected by Dickey for the Yale Younger Poets series--travel is an encounter with the strange and the familiar which, in the immediacy of recovery, has the quality of the uncanny. Stricken by a ``rogue car,'' the speaker of ``Amnesiac'' not only finds reality like a foreign country where the ``language . . . seems thick and faraway,'' but discovers pk that the most accustomed things exhibit a disturbing novelty, especially ``a bearded man who says he's my father.'' In the collection's best poem, two urban adventurers trespass in a condemned church; there they confront the almost nightmarish strangeness at the core of their Christian belief, and re-enact its origins as one pierces his foot with a nail in ``a tomb for faith.'' For the Greek Samaras himself, journeying to his ancestral land is to be ``home. And lost'' and astonished by basic truths--the meaning of his own name: ``Samaras from Samaria: / Saddle-maker .'' Although Samaras's somber, meditative tones sound simply complacent at times, his poetry often eloquently chronicles how exploring what is unknown enables one to experience again what one knows best of all. (May)