Going Out/Coming Back

True to its title, this volume is divided into two distinct sections. In the first, Kloefkorn ( Drinking the Tin Cup Dry ) assumes the persona of the schoolboy making the most of his smalltown existence. Growing up in the 1940s, at odds with the gentility expected of him, he sits with his grandmother and listens to a preacher's broadcast, but later in the same poem smashes the radio. In a masterful, understated tone, Kloefkorn captures the moment this boy with ``hayseed lips'' first becomes aware of ``the damp lips of Angelica'' smiling in his direction. In the second section a grandfather who seems to have been the boy of the book's first half relives the scenes of his past. Childhood figures take on mythical proportions as the narrator seeks out names and faces, only to find ``Some things don't come back to you, after all.'' Pieces in the two sections parallel each other: the boy who in the first half played at being Huck Finn later drinks ``Becky Thatchers'' on a riverboat, and the radio offers nothing but static. Quiet and unpresumptuous, these short poems fare far better than Kloefkorn's most ambitious effort, a seven-pager so consciously alternating between a speaker's childhood and his sundering marriage that it seems contrived. (May)