[In the following review of Magic City, by Komunyakaa, and Sleeping Preacher, by Julia Kasdorf, Friebert asserts that both volumes address the “facts” of human existence. Friebert observes that Magic City is a sort of extended autobiography of Komunyakaa's childhood in Louisiana.]

These two books, Kasdorf's first (and winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize) [Sleeping Preacher], and Komunyakaa's mid-career volume [Magic City] are measured and sober books that settle within the lines of their subjects and stories, and do not fool around with things the poets don't know. Though they celebrate very different cultures, lives and landscapes, both pursue the “facts” of human existence, often in similar ways and strategies.

There's something of Rita Dove's strategy with Thomas and Beulah in Kasdorf's ways with her relatives, her past—she was born into Mennonite and Amish communities in Pennsylvania—and her early experiences; she keeps the focus on the grown-ups and stays mainly out of the way except to record and denote. She almost never chooses to judge, which is welcome in any writer, especially one hoping to speak for so many; the reader is left to make the emotional calls, though sometimes that can be exasperating when complex situations aren't always fully sketched in. “Clear Night at the End of the Twentieth Century” is a case in point. It's an ambitious poem, and attempts to deal with a devastatingly ironic situation: “Jews rode in cattle cars east to their deaths, / and the wives and children of Mennonites / rode west in those cars, bound for Berlin, / delivered from Stalin. …” The narrator's mate in the poem is a Jew who would have trouble saving a German in a life-threatening situation, we are pretty much told as the poem ends; the narrator provides none of the reaction I feel is necessary at that point. Far more attention is paid along the way to the narrator's Mennonite ancestors, so I complain of a disturbing imbalance that does not reflect the complex nature of the “children” of such a past.

Quite a few of the poems laze along, seeming at times to be aimless, and don't follow up on emerging themes sufficiently for my taste, while losing themselves at times in unnecessary details. “Sunday Night Supper for a Mennonite, 1991” is especially diffuse and laggardly. A few other, stronger poems probably require half their length to get launched (see especially “Freindschaft,” which would be quite arresting if quickened). But why dwell on these shortcomings? All books have them, first or not. Who is it who said, “Often a poem is worth its own best line?” Let's look at two of the handful of fine poems, poems that convince me that Kasdorf will get stronger as she moves on:

“ALONG OCEAN PARKWAY IN BROOKLYN”

Three Hasidic boys talk like Amishmen,
hands in their long black coats that flap open
at the knees, heads nodding under hats.
They do not raise their pale, Prague cheeks
as I walk by. I am the world to them,
as I would have been to my father,
who once stood like this speaking low German
in a knot of boys at the edge of an auction lot.
Which of these will be the one to leave
our neighborhood of lavish bakeries
closed up tight for Passover,
as though leavening might leak into the streets
and keep the Children of Israel in Egypt?
I bless the one who leaves in anger or hurt,
bless the memory of his first cheeseburger
and the mind that returns for the rest of his life
to this corner, to the Hebrew storefronts
where old men drink dark tea in tumblers.
I praise equally the ones who stay
clustered like Amish farms in the dusk,
no phone lines running in, no circle
of light in the farmyards—
house, barn, coop, and crib
on the edge of the fields.

We all carry our own “cubic inch of ground” with us, even as we tread new earth, and what could at first glance be farther from Kasdorf's roots than this Brooklyn neighborhood? I like her determination to connect with what she does know, even as she struggles to ponder the otherness of the Hasidim. She might perhaps have stayed with the “boys” on their terms more, and not assumed so central a stance (“I am the world to them …”), but genuine regard and even affection arise for the foreign culture, while she plumbs her own, in the sketch-pad details of the closing stanza with their uncanny Hopper-like tone and mood, and the quiet force of the unrhymed tercets, in which the voice is (sometimes bleakly) under control. Note too the humor in the blessing of the memory of that first cheeseburger! But underneath all this is Kasdorf's expansive sense of what it means to leave one's familiar part of the world, as well as to stay rooted (or “behind,” as it were).

Here's the poem that most haunted me in the collection:

“WHEN OUR WOMEN GO CRAZY”

When our women go crazy, they're scared there won't be
enough meat in the house. They keep asking
but how will we eat? Who will cook? Will there be enough?
Mother to daughter, it's always the same
questions. The sisters and aunts recognize symptoms:
          she thinks there's no food, same as Mommy
          before they sent her away to that place,
          and she thinks if she goes, the men will eat
          whatever they find right out of the saucepans.
When our women are sane, they can tomatoes
and simmer big pots of soup for the freezer.
They are satisfied arranging spice tins
on cupboard shelves lined with clean paper.
They save all the leftovers under tight lids
and only throw them away when they're rotten.
Their refrigerators are always immaculate and full,
which is also the case when our women are crazy.

Never mind the initial uncertainty about the lineation, which reduces the import of the opening “facts” and seems little related to the last half of the piece. The crazy-sane dichotomy, implicit in the homely lives of women in this culture, who hand down with what seems like biological force their domestic duties to their children, is a chilling reminder of how baleful it is to be solely responsible for preparing the table in the presence of one's own, so to speak. There is even no relief in going crazy; the worries only multiply. In the cultures and subcultures we sometimes romanticize—I have bought bread and honey and pies from “immaculate” Amish women, while their children grouped nearby—we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. I especially respect the matter-of-fact tone that blueprints the scene.

Magic City is too simple a title for Yusef Komunyakaa's stirring auto- & biographical “tales,” that poke you to read them aloud. The many incidents and details that sometimes seem too extended on the page take on a life of their own, because the voices of the narrator and the other characters are so well heard and tracked. I'm reminded in passing that someone said at a reading by Maya Angelou, “I never heard them like that!” But even the untrained eye and ear will sense how carefully orchestrated the poems are, how they pulse along, pointed phrase to pointed phrase.

While it would be too much to claim that all the poems are parts of one long poem, they do come out of the same place, or neighborhood, and are mostly spoken the same way. At the same time, the poet has challenged himself, in the same way Kasdorf has, by trying to move out from autobiography and into a larger world. These poems make you want more, quite frankly, because they do so well what they set out to do.

Garrett Hongo's blurb overreaches, as blurbs will, but sums up the volume well, noting its celebration of “the natal world of Bogalusa, Louisiana with its lightning bugs, Mardi Gras flambeaus, pigweed, and chain-gangs …” I could add 100 other such subjects and objects that have seldom been treated in poetry. From “Banking Potatoes” to “Boys in Dresses,” the lived or imagined escapades are so comprehensive in their inclusiveness that an extended autobiography emerges, with its focus on a childhood. Not since reading Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Harry Crews' A Childhood, the biography of a place have I been so willing to look back at the stuff that presages, through the mind's eye of these writers, what we're in for next.

Any reader will have favorite poems but the two I have time to quote here stand for quite a few more:

“SLAM, DUNK, & HOOK”

Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury's
Insignia on our sneakers,
We outmaneuvered the footwork
Of bad angels. Nothing but a hot
Swish of strings like silk
Ten feet out. In the roundhouse
Labyrinth our bodies
Created, we could almost
Last forever, poised in midair
Like storybook sea monsters.
A high note hung there
A long second. Off
The rim. We'd corkscrew
Up & dunk balls that exploded
The skullcap of hope & good
Intention. Bug-eyed, lanky,
All hands & feet … sprung rhythm.
We were metaphysical when girls
Cheered on the sidelines.
Tangled up in a falling,
Muscles were a bright motor
Double-flashing to the metal hoop
Nailed to our oak.
When Sonny Boy's mama died
He played nonstop all day, so hard
Our backboard splintered.
Glistening with sweat, we jibed
& rolled the ball off our
Fingertips. Trouble
Was there slapping a blackjack
Against an open palm.
Dribble, drive to the inside, feint,
& glide like a sparrow hawk.
Lay ups. Fast breaks.
We had moves we didn't know
We had. Our bodies spun
On swivels of bone & faith
Through a lyric slipknot
Of joy, & we knew we were
Beautiful & dangerous.

In an age of films like White Men Can't Jump, how reassuring it is to have quite a different look at the phenomenon of the neighborhood pick-up game that is such a nucleus, guided as we are here, by a poet who is both seer and thinker, to much more than we've “seen” there before. (Several sociologists I know read poetry regularly alongside their other research.) I especially like the “sidemoves” here—to such connections as “bad angels,” “the roundhouse labyrinth,” “like storybook sea monsters,” “the skullcap of hope and good intention,” “sprung rhythm” (a nice in-joke), “we were metaphysical,” “muscles were a bright motor,” “swivels of bone & faith”—that comment on the vocabulary of the game itself, on its way to that “lyric slipknot of joy” in ways the ancient Greeks would have understood.

Notice too the episode, that rightly quickly passes almost like a footnote, of Sonny Boy's mama's death. The truth of the matter is indeed that he not only played on, but that he was likely wise to do so, only harder, “so hard / Our backboard splintered.” That is both “beautiful & dangerous,” and takes us past easy rhetoric, like “black is beautiful,” even as it is sharply etched, like an epitaph.

Finally, here's a magnificent poem that recalls the humility and generosity of Hayden's Those Winter Sundays:

“MY FATHER'S LOVE LETTERS”

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams' “Polka Dots & Moonbeams”
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
with old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences …
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

I can't imagine how hard it must be to render a fair, accurate, and yet searching account of everyone's role in what has become an all-too familiar story of abuse, an account that doesn't dodge the deep human issues. Very little seems forgotten or overlooked here, though only a few things are beginning to be forgiven. Even the speaker himself, who in a younger writer might have been allowed easy judgment, or, worse, victimization, is at pains to recall, “Somehow I was happy / She had gone …” The agony and ache of “Words that rolled from under the pressure / Of my ballpoint: Love, / Baby, Honey, Please” is huge, as the ballpoint becomes the one tool that might bring what has been missing between the parents.

What the poem is especially fine with and about is the ways it registers “the quiet brutality,” not only of those meters and threaders. And fine too in seeing that sunset pulled through into the toolshed, a place that rings with paradox—here the father is most alive and at home among the artifacts of his life, even as what issues from them is anything but life-building. What the narrator restores to his parent is the decency, at least and at last, of guiding him along in the struggle for the language of love, the instinct to try to say a few “magic” words that will somehow atone and be accepted for what they mean, that will “almost” get said, but not by him.