Shouting at No One, and: Everyday Life (review)

reviews 129 Shouting at No One by Lawrence Joseph. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. 55 pp. $5.95 (paper). Everyday Life by Greg Kuzma. Peoria, Illinois: Spoon River Poetry Press, 1982. 54 pp. $4.50 (paper). These are two books of poems about the common lives of ordinary people, but there much of the similarity ends. Joseph's Shouting at No One—a passionate, ambitious, at times strangely beautiful book—is about the big city (Detroit) and about immigrants, factories , violence, and God. Much of its beauty arises from the skillful blending of Middle Eastern images and speech rhythms with the patterns of daily life and speech of the Detroit streets. Kuzma's Everyday Life, on the other hand, is set in small-town Nebraska and the surrounding countryside. It is a limited, privatized—sometimes smug—collection of poems that have little passion or ambition, although a few of them do have a kind of restricted beauty. One might think that these two books, taken together, would give us another example of the ongoing debate between the country and the city. But, interestingly, the debate happens separately within each volume, not by juxtaposing them. A reader has to like the poems Lawrence Joseph has collected in his volume. They are truly poems of the common life of human beings. They are urban poems, filled with bars, factories, automobiles, filth, the evils of racism, murder, slums, pain and suffering, the effor to be human. Joseph's verses detail an ongoing argument with Detroit, with the U.S., with himself and his own Middle Eastern heritage, with God. The poems of part I are personal , familial; those of part II, social; of part III, about God—although all the poems are one way or another "about" Detroit, being an immigrant there, growing up there, living and working there. The landscape of Detroit presented here is (not surpisingly) bleak, polluted, desolate, burned; and all of the poems are a battle with despair, a battle waged relentlessly but inconclusively. In each of the book's three sections a strong voice is at work, a voice which is often the subject of the poems. In the first section's opening poem, Then," about the poet's father and the riots, we read the closing lines: "You wouldn't have known / it would take nine years / before you'd realize the voice howling in you / was born then." That voice carries us through several fine poems, in part I, about markets; about a woman met and sung to and danced with in a coffee house, after work at the factory; about Poletown; about the murder of a Black man who "wrote poems of babies / in frozen tenements, / garbage alive with maggots, / the love a woman makes, / the greasy riders with Detroit skin, / the toughest in the world,"—the Black man who might have been "the poet of this hell." Joseph also writes of his own feelings after his fater (I assume) was shot in the chest (but lived) while at work in his grocery store, a poem which ends: "I don't want / the angel inside me, sword in hand, / to be silent. / Not yet." Part II, mainly concerning the experiences of Syrian and Lebanese Catholic immigrants in Detroit, contains the books's most ambitious poems. The first one, "The Phoenix Has Come to a Mountain in Lebanon," is a lovely, melancholy poem about the decision to leave Lebanon for Detroit; it also indicates the mythic dimensions of the book. In "He Is Khatchig Gaboudabian" (about a defeated socialist) we have scenes like the following: "In Salina, South Dearborn, / the air is cold, damp, deep / black and red, filled / with sulphur and the earth / roaring inside machines. / Crowds of young men on the street shake and nod their heads, / waiting for the midnight shift." Such simplicity of statement, the realms of experience here brought to American poetry, I find compelling. Part III of Joseph's book is essentially an argument with God—the God inside the poet. In There Is a God Who Hates Us So Much," we hear that "the city is the shadow / strapped to my back. / I am the poet of that...