Pharaoh, Pharaoh

A soft, romantic spirit haunts this collection of poems, a meditation on the events and repercussions of lives lived in the South. In ""Searching the Title,"" which establishes the author's place among family and upon the land, an ""old, forgotten dimension"" is symbolized by a fading map. Andrews digs under the skin of events and objects to get at significance, even if it's only hinted at. ""Auction"" muses about the character of a dead man and his wife through the inventory of their possessions: ""His late wife's dressing table gives up/ its confused vanities: snaggletooth combs,/ the warbled wire of hairpins, a lipstick,/ a faint layer of blush over all."" The middle poems wend through a familiar scenery of rural fences, funerals, a farm grave, a chicken coop, moonlight, a road that once was a riverbed. At one point, the poet remembers getting sick with ""romantic fever"" and lying in bed watching the fireflies ""coughing up light."" The final poems in the book hover around death: the dying of animals, the picking clean of their bones by buzzards and the dying of humans. Andrews often displays a subtle craft and an eye for symbolic, compelling detail. But many of the poems describe a mood of privatized sentimentality that is neither immediate nor engaging. These spare, melancholy poems, with their fenced-in, distant clarity, remain in the province of the writer. (May) FYI: This collection is part of the publisher's Southern Messenger Poets series, edited by Dave Smith.