for good. As it would from now on
every day, with every twitch and blink.
There are many metaphorical "dances" -- the sexual tension of couples, Salome dancing, a woman's "dance" with the gun she is skittishly learning to shoot. And, as in any good poem, there is the playful dance of language. In a middle section, Dove flattens her voice and switches to a historical theme -- a sequence honoring the accomplishments of black soldiers fighting World War I. Her chanteuse charms turn colloquial. For example, in "The Return Of Lieutenant James Reese Europe," the opening lines are reminiscent of Randall Jarrell:
We trained in the streets: the streets where we came from.
We drilled with sticks, boys darting between bushes, shouting --
that's all you thought we were good for. We trained anyway.
In content, American Smooth is slighter than most of Dove's previous collections but heavy on "grace notes" -- short or minimal poems. But as with her previous collections, many poems describe a woman's response to a violent world, a response that, more often than not, is loving. The light of this generous response illuminates even her least ambitious poems.
In a collection of more or less the same length as Dove's, Komunyakaa, clearly a history buff, initiates a big project -- possibly an epic. Taboo is the first part of a "Wishbone Trilogy," which, though it's too early to tell, may rival Ezra Pound's Cantos for ambitiousness.
Almost every poem in this collection of tercets refers to a black historical figure and most reflect a decided predilection for prurient tales, the taboo. A few poems involving other histories also tell stories of romantic outsiders, hipsters, homosexuals, desperadoes -- "black" characters in the same sense that Clinton was labeled the first black president. In this collection, to experience blackness is to live with mystery, hysteria, soulfulness, persecution or poverty. "Hagar's Daughter" begins:
She left Greenbush as Fire
Flower, Sparkling Fire, & Ish-
scoodah, headed for Oberlin
College at thirteen,
the Credit River Reserve
