By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, May 27, 2007; BW11

Cuban life before Castro has supplied American poetry with rich, ambiguous material. An engaging, poignant group of poems in Peg Boyers's new book, Honey with Tobacco, includes childhood memories of that time. Boyers declines mere nostalgia, as in this poem that scrutinizes pleasure-seeking, a leisured class, even memory itself, with a cool attention, analytical as well as sympathetic. The reference to a central incident in E.M. Forster's novel A Passage to India operates as allusion should, as a compact, rapid inclusion of themes: in this case, the ambiguity of events, especially erotically charged events, the sinister underside of privilege, the prolonged receding and the long reach of colonial history, the interweaving of private life and social reality:

It was a beach

like all beaches, only perhaps more beautiful.

And the sand was pink not red.

We would arrive in caravans,

hampers overflowing with food and drink

like Aziz and his party on the way to Malabar.

The colonials and their servants away on an outing.

We would stop under thatch umbrellas,

towels and tablecloths spread out against the sea.

My mother in her skirted swim suit

surrounded by fathers of other children,

her olive skin lit through her straw hat.

They would laugh and drink beer

and leer

while the children did the usual beach things,

boring futile tunnels to China, running

at waves and then away,

daring each other to be swallowed.

I would go out by the forbidden rocks and pick off oysters,

then give them to the men to pry open,

cover with lime juice and suck dry.

Once, I saw my mother sucking

an oyster out of another daddy's hand.

Her dappled face bobbed and smiled and her tongue

searched the shell for pearls.

The vivid childhood memory, seen from the perspective of the adult poet who has read Forster, mingles the language of "another daddy" with "the colonials and their servants away on an outing." Boyers's poem, mingling innocence and knowledge, takes its place in the long tradition of idylls, pastorals, depictions of pleasure and elegant surfaces, with their underlying or suppressed realities.

(Peg Boyers's poem "Playa Colorada" is from her book "Honey with Tobacco." Univ. of Chicago. Copyright 2007 by the

University of Chicago.)

Robert Pinsky was poet laureate of the United States

from 1997 through 2000.