Away the Lifeboats!

By Walter Kirn

If a poem is read aloud in a bookstore but no one is around to listen to it (because everyone is off sipping espresso in the cafe or skimming the latest shock-a-minute memoir), does it make a sound? This April--designated National Poetry Month by the Academy of American Poets--might be a good time to ponder that question. More admired in principle than in practice, more respected than read, American poetry has survived the '90s through a combination of benign neglect, accumulated goodwill and a devoted cult of readers who will still be on deck reciting favorite lines should the poetic Titanic ever go down. But there's good news: the lifeboats have been launched. This publishing season brings three books--J.D. McClatchy's Ten Commandments, Yusef Komunyakaa's Thieves of Paradise and Deborah Garrison's A Working Girl Can't Win--with room for passengers of every class.

Ten Commandments (Knopf; 96 pages; $21) is the finest of the three volumes, a reputation-making wonder that isn't just the year's best book of poems but may also turn out to be the year's best book. Poised, architectural and built to last in the effortlessly disciplined tradition of W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell, the poems also have a sharp confessional kick worthy of Anne Sexton at her most bruising. In "My Mammogram," McClatchy, 52 (editor of the Yale Review and author of the libretto for Emmeline, a new opera by Tobias Picker that opens next week at Lincoln Center), recounts a disturbing examination for cancer of the male breast: "Mammography's on the basement floor./ The nurse has an executioner's gentle eyes./ I start to unbutton my shirt. She shuts the door." The diagnosis: no malignancy, but an identity-warping excess of the female hormone estrogen. "The end of life as I've known it, that is to say--/ Testosterone sported like a power tie... "

Ten Commandments is divided into sections that correspond to the laws on Moses' tablets ("My Mammogram" counts the virile male physique as perhaps the ultimate graven image). Its theology is deeply personal, more biographical than biblical. "My Old Idols" remembers the crisp erotic sting of a parochial school instructor wielding a pointer while drilling pupils in Greek: "Accounts of murder and sacrifice/ Only suggested the heavy price/ I longed to pay at his behest." Born on the Main Line, an upscale, old-money suburban Philadelphia neighborhood, McClatchy has an aristocratic tartness that comes through both in his stanzas and in his remarks about poetry in general, which he sees slipping into sloppy populism. "There are a lot of Sunday painters out there; they don't expect their paintings to hang in museums. But every time someone puts down his feelings on a piece of paper, he expects to be published. It's an art, after all," McClatchy says. "It's not just a feel-good sort of thing."

No one could accuse Yusef Komunyakaa, 50, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a tenured professor at Princeton, of writing self-indulgent, feel-good verse, and he shows why in Thieves of Paradise (Wesleyan University; 128 pages; $19.95). Raised in a particularly racist precinct of rural Louisiana, Komunyakaa, who is black, was drafted into the Vietnam War and assigned to write for the Southern Cross, a newspaper for infantrymen. Thirty years later, the artillery fire still echoes in his work. In "Ia Drang Valley," a slender, striking war poem both lyrical and blunt, a soldier dreams himself into a Goya painting of a firing squad: "I stand/ before the bright rifles,/ nailed to the moment." Komunyakaa's other great theme is race, and not just his own. In "Quatrains for Ishi" he follows a Native American from his capture on the California frontier to his interment in San Francisco's Museum of Anthropology.

Deborah Garrison's A Working Girl Can't Win (Random House; 61 pages; $15) is an airy, appealing first book, much of which has already been published in the New Yorker, where Garrison, 33, is an editor. It follows a young urban professional in her confusing emotional commute from home to office, heart to head, the world of feeling to the world of work. Sweet and refreshing, though at times so light the lines dissolve on the page--"I'm never going to sleep/ with Martin Amis/ or anyone famous."--the verses go down easy, like frosty cocktails. Some of the imagery is old and pat, as when Garrison compares a married couple to a pair of birds on a telephone wire, but much of it is new and cheeky: "Sometimes it's funny, this after-hour when/ whatever hasn't happened between us/ hasn't happened again..." As Garrison's book proves, not all good poems are hard poems, and sometimes the lines you can hum are also the lines you can't forget.