POETS’ CORNER

CARVER: A Life in Poems, By Marilyn Nelson, Front Street Press: 104 pp., $16.95

“Carver: A Life in Poems” is a biography-in-verse that has a non-chronological, impressionistic force. Marilyn Nelson’s poems close in on the interior life of a historical figure.

George Washington Carver was born a slave but was adopted by the childless white couple who had owned his mother. Carver never thought like a slave--his imagination indentured him to no one and to nothing (“Something says find out/why rain falls, what makes corn proud....”). This remarkably self-possessed young man separated himself early from his adoptive family, following his sense of himself (“the perceived self” as he called it, with a philosophical wink) toward a destiny that included college, a master’s degree and the founding of an agricultural department at the all-black Tuskegee Institute.

His unusual, questing intelligence is provocatively revealed by Nelson--whose ambitious, fluid verse style, familiar to readers of her earlier award-winning books, is put to engaging use here.

In a series of linked meditations, she creates the narrative of a renegade botanist and inventor who realized early that what we now call earth science and enlightened cultivation of the soil could be solutions to poverty.

Contemporary poets are enamored of science and its idioms, often to awkward, pretentious effect: Nelson flashes the dramatic rhetoric of the laboratory: “What about ASCLEPIAS SYRIACA?/What about IPOMOEA BATATAS?” But the larger questions of this collection center on racism and Carver’s wise, eccentric heroism in the face of institutionalized ignorance. These poems do him overdue justice.

*

SOURCE, By Mark Doty, HarperCollins: 96 pp., $22

“Source” is Mark Doty’s sixth book of poems and in some ways his best. His previous collections appeared to add up to a completed journey of the psyche. “My Alexandria,” for example, startled readers with its Cavafy-like tone that turned to fierce elegy, prefiguring his next collection, the grieving and cathartic “Atlantis,” followed in turn by the dizzying resurrective explosion of “Sweet Machine.” With “Source,” Doty has moved further toward a powerful maturity of style and a gravity of purpose that open new poetic territory and deepen his famously mimetic voice.

In a searching literary and “civic” poem, “Letter to Walt Whitman,” he invokes the ghost of the great poet at Whitman’s preserved home-place in rundown Camden, N.J. He meditates on Whitman’s personal effects and mourns his vision of a democratic republic, now lost.

Doty’s concerns are similarly public and private in other poems and always, as the book’s title indicates, passionately epistemological. The soul is neither a conceit nor an analogical construct here, rather an embodied force, a nearly material form. The soul alters the world the body inhabits, not the other way around, and each soul has a history:

Making new

builds upon every layer come before;

we’re joined to whoever

wore the stairstep down, or cracked

the corner of a windowpane, or waxed

these boards when company was coming.

Lines like these both confirm and newly invent Doty’s reputation for cogent music and precise inspired imagery. With the large-minded risky themes of these new poems, he has reset the stakes of his language and expanded his vision once again. Doty is always moving forward, at the same time as he moves back to the beginning, the source.

*

BORROWED DRESS, By Cathy Colman, University of Wisconsin Press:

100 pp., $18.95

In Mark Doty’s citation for the Felix Pollack Prize won by Cathy Colman’s “Borrowed Dress,” the poet is described as an “engaged mind worrying out a way of seeing the world.”

Worry is at the heart of these poems, and it is a kind of ecstatic rumination. The poems pore over experience, pecking at the minutes like a quick vigilant bird. (“See how that square of sunlight foreshadows/a bigger radiance in the day.” “Whack the pinata of childhood/until something ugly flies out.”)

Out of the river of worry, the lyric rhythms of these poems accumulate insight--then nervously turn from insight, searching for belief. This book is a little like caffeine and its effects: smart and jittery with a distinct blended taste of hedonism and guilt. No sweeteners: This is bracing home brew, like the title’s borrowed dress, a dip into the unexpected, the familiar world made fresh and strange and sensuous.