Watcher in Black and Other Poems

Bringing together selections from decades of his writing, this collection provides a glimpse into the mind and spirit of Boucher (1927–2013), a psychiatric social worker, an avid mountain climber, and the father of punk rock legend Jello Biafra. Many of the poems are modern takes on pastoral themes, as in the poem “Progress and Poverty,” in which a “huge flow of mesa” gets “Shut into privacy,/ A valuable tract for valued seclusion,” guarded by “the sheriff’s ire/ Hung on miles of barbed wire.” Even when not directly engaging with alpine imagery, an elevated, masculine voice tends to guide these often-rhyming poems. Perhaps the most affecting are those relating to Boucher’s Korean War service. He describes the unsettling anticipation of going to war as a kind of collective bloodlust that becomes conflated with sexual desire: “Seated here, rifles and knees stabbing upwards,/ We are clumps and trees/ Rooted and confined in useless thrusts.” A tenderness emerges in elegiac pieces such as “January—Three Years Later,” about a climb he took with his deceased father: “All we really share, each separate human face,/ Each locked in its own interminable, all too terminable race:/ Is this feel of snow to an ungloved questing hand.” Despite points of unevenness, Boucher displays a sympathetic, bittersweet voice. [em](BookLife) [/em]