POETS’ CORNER

Embers

A Novel in Poems

Terry Wolverton

Red Hen Press: 160 pp., $15.95 paper

Terry WOLVERTON’S new book of poems (or novel in poems) turns on imagery of languishing fire or fire reborn, stirred up from hot ash and coal. Here the embers slow burn over a century and are blazingly embodied in one broken, volatile family. From Huron tribal myths to Detroit’s gritty industry of anecdote, the author whips up a bright conflagration. These are “true” family stories fictionalized, as the reader is informed in a preface statement. Wolverton appropriates her ancestors’ lives: re-imagines the life of a grandmother adrift in a kind of purgatory. All is seen through the fixed lens of the poet’s narrative; even the most banal detail is given gravitas.

The inclination to epic-size statement is strong here (“Once this was the sea. Woodward Avenue / was brine....” “We know the body is the house / of consciousness”), and this portentousness can overwhelm the poems. When the fictionalized facts are released from this self-conscious debt to enormity -- and are allowed the intensity of the particular -- the book grows more convincing and casts its brighter shadows:

Navy Recruiting, where blue-

clad men refuse you because

of rotten teeth. I never

planned to bite the enemy.

*

Original Fire

Louise Erdrich

HarperCollins: 176 pp., $23.95

In “Original Fire,” Louise Erdrich presents a similar landscape to Wolverton’s -- all the colors and emotions of the past, family legend and anecdote, the fluid architectures of tribal ritual. My mother’s family comes from the part of North Dakota that Erdrich has brushed with fire again and again. The authentic familiar cadences of local speech, speech from the mouths of farmers, townsfolk, transients, Ojibway tribespeople as well as divinities of all types, call up the powerful understatement of the prairie, the open miles under racing sky or the stunted back roads:

Ray’s third new car in half as many years.

Full cooler in the trunk, Ray sogging the beer

As I solemnly chauffeur us through the bush

And up the backroads, hardly cowpaths and hub-deep in mud

Erdrich’s fiction is more powerful than her poetry, but the poems are hypnotic and retain an emphatic passionate fire. It is also interesting to note that the poems seem close to prose at times. Thus we have “The Butcher’s Wife” here -- a kind of nucleus of her recent novel, “The Master Butchers Singing Club.”

This is Erdrich’s first collection of poetry in 14 years, combining work from two previous books plus a selection of new poems. The earlier poems hold up and the new sections, filled with steady aching grief, lift up, at times, into quiet radiance: “Again I am a child. I stand in the snow / And all around me is the snow / I stand there until I turn to snow / And then, for a moment, I know you.”

*

The Best American

Poetry 2003

Edited by Yusef Komunyakaa

Scribner: 288 pp., $16 paper

“The Best American Poetry” is guest-edited this year by Yusef Komunyakaa, but David Lehman, the series editor, writes (as always) an engaging and provocative foreword. Lehman touches on poetry’s public representation, the evolution of the “laureateship,” both nationally and in states like New Jersey, where Amiri Baraka raised his mad song. Still, as Lehman argues, we continue to seek poetry that “embodies content” and stands against “forgetting.” Komunyakaa’s introduction adopts this theme and sets aside doomsaying (“those who have hammered nails into poetry’s coffin again and again”) by announcing that “poetry is in steady hands.”

“Steady” is an apt adjective in describing the poems included here. There are few whoop-de-do dazzlers; these poems are full of quiet beauties. Carolyn Kizer’s “After Horace” sets an ironic, low-key tone (“Spare me the Roman wars, and those / Who battled on in myths”); and deepening this tone, we have J.D. McClatchy’s “Jihad,” “the holy war waged against the self first.”