cover image From a Person Sitting in Darkness: New and Selected Poems

From a Person Sitting in Darkness: New and Selected Poems

Gerald Barrax. Louisiana State University Press, $20.95 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-8071-2314-0

The four books assembled here, and the new poems that follow, chart this earnest, observant poet's shifts, over thirty years, from a melange of promisingly contradictory goals to a more direct, hortatory style, and finally to near-automatic formality. Another Kind of Rain (1970) includes all kinds of poems--understated reportage, grand dream visions, allegorical arguments, songs, jokes, transcribed conversations, political feuilletons; their tactics include a syncopated directness learned from Langston Hughes, and a synaesthetic elevation that recalls Hart Crane: ""You should have been an island child and dived or fallen/ Into water that liquefied sunlight."" Barrax's range of subjects begins wide--a son fishing, Martin Luther King's death, the poet's teenage circumcision, Hero and Leander, Romeo and Juliet, Adam and Eve, madrigals and the African-American ritual insults called ""the dozens."" His extraordinary sadnesses, and his feel for weird events, can surpass his word-by-word feel for language, waxing wildly sentimental (""every day/ nature fills her womb/ with our dead/ and blooms""). His later poems grow clearer, more predictable, more preoccupied with his young children, and with the largest possible questions of history and justice: ""I know that's who I am, what I am/ when the souls of Black folk sing""; ""The universe already thrashes/ in a big fishnet of words."" In his work of the 1990s, long odes address cellos and cellists, old girlfriends, and God (""all those years You had Your way with me./ I gave You every chance""); the volume concludes with a set of strained and conventional sonnets. (Nov.)