Poet's Choice

Eugene Gloria's new book, Hoodlum Birds , demonstrates a central quality of poetry: depth of language, the power to get past the first surfaces of words and of things. Or to put it differently, the power to hear harmonies beyond the obvious ones, finding new undertones of meaning.

Instead of the customary, sensible and predictable word, poetry discovers one that vibrates with meaning. When Shakespeare says "Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow" (in Sonnet 30), the lethal and exaggerated meaning of "drown" communicates an ambivalent, self-critical feeling: His weepy mood may be self-indulgent or less than clear-sighted.

Gloria's book brings the historical and the contemporary into fresh, vivid relation, so that the street and the museum are no longer sealed off neatly from one another. He finds the buried historical passions underlying a world of Cadillacs and fistfights. And conversely, he finds a contemporary urgency in violent saints' lives. Gloria's material is not limited to a tough American neighborhood or a 12th-century Andalucian Jewish poet, but traces the currents of feelings and ideas that run between the two.

I don't mean simply his eclectic range of reference -- though it is pleasing to read poems that can speak with conviction about the poet Lorca and the painter Zurburán and with similar passion about the boxer Flash Elorde or the neighborhoods of Manila and Anaheim. Beyond that, and beyond the mere metaphor-making ability to see things in terms of other things, the poems attain a robust sense of reality. The title brings the language of the first term, "hoodlum," together with the observed reality of the second term, "birds." That simple procedure is richly imagined:

Hoodlum Birds

The fearless blackbirds see me again

at the footpath beside the tall grasses

sprouting like unruly morning hair.

They caw and caw like vulgar boys

on street corners making love to girls

with their "hey mama

this" and their "hey mama that."

But this gang of birds is much too slick.