Twentieth Century Blues

...We like to think that it puts us in touch with a more primitive way of being like that of the Indian...

...Some of the poems are even spoken in the voice of Prospero...

...Equally distinguished as a critic...

...Smith now edits the venerable Southern Review, once a mouthpiece for the Fugitive writers who influenced him...

...fascination and disgust mix with mourning and anger, all tinged with a teenager's ambivalence about growing up: "By accident/I became the boy-father of the house,/ owner of obscenities and a family/ of creeps who fingered me as one./ What else is the world but a box/ false-bottomed, where the ugly truths/ wait sailing in the skins of ancestors...

...In other words, our own natures distrust wholeness, searching for imperfections that we can recognize as being no better than ourselves...

...In the United States, deliberate attempts to blend the native vernacular with some of the syncopations and bittersweet dissonances of jazz can be traced in an unbroken line from Vachel Lindsay and Amy Lowell to Carl Sandburg and the early T. S. Eliot, through Robert Penn Warren, Allen Ginsburg and Anne Sexton, up to such recent poets as James Dickey, James Merrill, Louise Gluck, and Brad Leit-hauser...

...the poem "Prayer" reproachfully asks the omniscient Being...

...Like 20th-century music, poetry in the Anglo-American tradition has experimented with freer harmonies and rhythms...

...The same idea occurs to Smith, but not romantically: I think unaccountably of an early snow, children with black, hungry eyes, men cutting arrows where the elders bud...

...Don Giovanni turns seduction into an art form, but what he actually seeks from his conquests is surcease from boredom...

...Prospero is shown subsequent to the close of The Tempest, when he has drowned his magic paraphernalia and returned from his Edenic exile to late Renaissance Europe...

...Some of these verses make bold to cross-examine God...

...The power of the three original collections is even more evident in Floating On Solitude...

...The local fauna at Fredericksburg gives him a metaphor for the Enola Gay: one silly pod slung on wing-tip, high up, and egg cradled by some rapacious mockingbird...

...In this country particularly, we have recently seen a procession of minimalists, confessional poets, neoformalists, "language poets," and a dozen or so other schools...

...What might we term the prevailing manner of our own century, where fashions have ranged from song-like impressionism in the teens to the ironic subtleties of Modernism...

...The wry lyrics that contain these observations shimmer with ideas the way an opal does with colors in the changing light...

...This author's fancy returns often to certain basic motifs: his coming of age in Virginia's tidewater country, the life of the watermen who fish that area, race relations in the '50s and '60s, a variety of natural landscapes seen and imagined, the violence that intrudes into ordered lives when least expected, a parental solicitude for his children...

...Many of these poems get their kick from the sense that everyday life can, in an instant, slide into horror...

...Pankey's teasing speculations often move in several directions, leading the reader's attention along a playful path that, not infrequently, ends in a disturbing conclusion...

...Similarly, a pair of marvelous poems about the Civil War battlefield at Fredericksburg manages to capture gritty particulars—The big steel tourist shield says maybe/ fifteen thousand got it here"while meditating that even this number of deaths still seems more comprehensible than the mass destruction of nuclear weapons...

...Pankey's art suggests the smokey, sophisticated vocal line of Billie Holiday and Jelly Roll Mortonhalf rueful, half mocking of audience and self...

...Read as a sequence, these poems show how Smith learned to combine his ear for nuance with his eye for detail, his contemporary angst with his empathetic respect for the stoic lives he writes about...

...This Southern poet has written a prodigious amount since his 1970 debut...

...Consider, too, the prevalent dark themes of brutality and squalor coupled with murky psychodramas of the unconscious mind, and you, poetry reader, will find yourself humming along with the 20th-century blues...

...The Last Morning," which opens the book, serves as a map of how Smith's mind makes associations...

...The Pornography Box" recalls how as an adolescent he stumbled upon his dead father's cache of dirty pictures...

...What do you love better: the ruin or its repair...

...Yet we keep on listening, with pleasure, because the plaintive wail of our century's poetry tells us our own story...

...and Dream Flights—contains so many poems that have worn well and stuck in the minds of critics and readers...

...The sight summons up an event from Smith's childhood, though he waits ti 11 the end of the poem ("Goshawk, Antelope") to let us in on the identification with "the accusing goshawk face of my father," who evidently was violent toward his wife and son...

...Most of us enjoy this kind of pastorale on occasion...

...These lines sound blue notes, to be sure...

...The invention of perfection was The Fall-Still, one longs for discord and accords the flaw Dominion over the whole...

...The reissue of three books first published in 1976,1979 and 1981, respectively, is especially welcome, because this triptych—Cumberland Station...

...In a brief Preface, Smith once again alludes to the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay area and their "lonely, dangerous, hard, and unglorious life that always seemed to me as grand and proud and mysterious as the lives of the mythical heroes our books praise...

...Once upon a time, believers tried to accept misfortune as a "test" through which God intended to refine and purify the soul...

...Despite these constant concerns, Smith's art has restlessly sought fresh poetic forms and new ways of expressing his vision...

...Have there been any common threads running through the warp of this coat of many colors...

...An evocative photograph on the book's cover taken by Smith, "Workboats Abandoned and Sunk by Watermen, Posquon, Virginia," serves to remind us that his imagination is haunted by passing ways of life...

...As for romance (with or without the capital R), it "conceals a dark tragedy/ Played out long before the play begins...

...After being the master of his island, he now finds himself in competition with the greatest artists and musicians of the period...

...Nothing is quite as it seems: that is the underlying sensibility...

...Goshawk, Antelope...

...Light, the common denominator,/ Does not conceive, but cloaks and covers," we learn in "The Pear as One Example...

...Driving through Wyoming, he watches a hawk circle in the sky and then dive toward a trembling antelope...

...For examples of human creators, Pankey chooses two familiar literary figures...

...Earlier in the century, philosophers worriedor rejoiced, according to temperament over the possible demise of the deity...

...Elsewhere, "words meant to illuminate/ Can only conceal...

...Like the blues, this poetry wrings defiant victory out of the struggles and defeats of daily existence...

...Black Widow" turns his pregnant wife's discovery of a deadly spider into the realization that the couple fear the coming birth and what it may bring...

...In this epiphany he perceives how desperate the existence of nomadic peoples can be as they face the perils of inclement weather, the burden of hunting to avoid starvation, and the depredations of warfare...

...The classic blues of the deep South, alternately plaintive and defiant, seem a singularly apposite analogue for Dave Smith's throaty lyrics...

...And whatever phase he happens to be in, his voice is always compelling and worth listening to...

...To produce anything fresh, he must make "a feast of his misreading" of others...

...The fourth collection of Eric Pankey, The Late Romances (Knopf, 77 pp., $21.00), is set in an atmosphere reminiscent of Shakespeare's dark comedies, like The Winter's Tale and The Tempest...

...It begins deceptively with descriptions of ordinary camping rituals washing clothes in a stream by the time-honored method of beating them on rocks, quietly observing the summer beauties of unspoiled woodlands...

...This postmodern view of creativity culminates in a contemporary image: the poet trying to peer out of a rain-streaked window that reflects back his own face, "A self-portrait through which he must look to see...

...Smith pulls no punches in this painful story, yet by the end he has achieved a hard-won compassion toward his parents and his younger self the very understanding of human frailty that allowed him to write this poem...

...If Smith's gritty lyrics belt out a music that evokes Bessie Smith or Blind Lemon Jefferson...

...But what redemptive lesson can be internalized from the wholesale destruction of millionsin death camps, bombing raids, famines, or pandemics...

...They have now been gathered into a single volume, Floating on Solitude (Illinois, 331 pp., $ 16.95), whose title is taken from the anthropologist and poet Loren Eis-ley: "The fate of man is to be the ever-recurrent, reproachful Eye floating upon the night and solitude...

...Pankey takes the position (for the sake of argument, at least) that Christ is present but hardly satisfactory, being too unlike us...

...On Poetry TWENTIETH CENTURY BLUES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Accurately or not, we tend to associate past eras of poetry with a dominant style: metaphysical mysticism for the 17th century, neoclassicism for the 18th, romanticism for the 19th...

...You love all things equally," the poet complains, "and that is your flaw...

...He goes on the describe how, after the death of a fisherman, it was customary for friends to drive his boat aground "on a spot familiar to, maybe loved by, the deceased where others riding water in or out might see the boat, and see its man in the mind's eye...

...Two-Part Invention," however, takes a slightly different stance: One should not love the grackle for its song, Nor the pine for its flora...

...Often a simple incident revives the poet's memory of past trauma...

...I think so...

...If one must, The anvil may as well be an altar And the loom the scaffolding of heaven...