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This novel is written in language that "did not grow fast"— unsentimental, precise, and deeply felt. As in the collection of poems, Sassafras seems the work of sustained, hard-won vision. Both works have their maker's mark upon them, language at once utterly concrete and also, seemingly, in the act of purifying itself into silence. —Mary Ann Taylor-Hall Mark DeFoe. Aviary. Buckhannon: Pringle Tree Press, 2001. 31 pages. $10.00. In recent conversation with a poet-friend, we shared a common complaint that many volumes of contemporary poetry contain poems of highly inconsistent quality. The precision or control of voice may shift, attention to aesthetics and craft perhaps wavers, with the result being that only three or four poems may strike a powerful nerve. Not so with Mark DeFoe's book Aviary. Though the volume is slight—at only thirty-one pages—and was long in the making, DeFoe's integrity is remarkably apparent throughout. He has not rushed the writing or the publication process. As closely as I can count, each poem was previously anthologized or published in an established literaryjournal. However, the intensity and ease of the poems belie the time DeFoe has spent nurturing and honing his ability. Although his subject matter is incredibly varied, a consistent, confident voice penetrates each poem; and matching the range of topics is DeFoe's facility with stanza patterns and rhyme and meter. Several poems are written in blank verse, and others in quatrains of rhymed or unrhymed iambic pentameter. Two poems, "In the Painting of the Newly Painted Porch," and "On Mr. Frost's Path," are sonnets, in which DeFoe manipulates and contemporizes the form to a charming degree. Even in the freest of his free verse, a careful musicality is evident, especially in the condensed, tight lines and unusual sound choices. This is obviously a deliberate move, given the title of the volume: An aviary is, of course, an environment for birds, and the "birds" in DeFoe's collection sing. For instance, these concluding lines from the opening poem, "In the Painting of the Newly Painted Porch," reveal the bird motif that runs throughout the volume and also DeFoe's skill with language: "A robin sweeps over the lawn, banks, and flares//to the shimmering plane of green. It cocks/ its head. It hops once. Its eye shines onyx." The clipped sentences, the sharp consonants, and the slant rhyme 89 between "cocks" and "onyx" provide a terse end to an earlier fluid phrasing. The end of the first poem says, with its sense and also with its music, that we should wake up, be inquisitive, be ready to look carefully into the poems which follow. The poem is a true prelude. It is perhaps such a direct focus on awareness which binds the dissimilar subjects of the poems. The poems in Aviary may behave, then, as a flock of birds, but each hatched from a different species. There is humor and death and pain. There are poems about travel, displacement, and home. I believe most readers will not find DeFoe to be a "regional poet," although two or three poems directly touch on the people and landscape of Appalachia and DeFoe's uniquely perceived West Virginia where he has taught and lived for many years. Whatever his topic of choice, DeFoe presents time and again a persona on the verge of his own sensitivity and curiosity. Of course many poems are created out of a poet's heightened sense of the world around him or her. But in many of DeFoe's poems, this exercise of paying attentionbecomes an actual thematic issue. In "Sunday Morning: Mad for the Dazzle of New Data, I skip Church to Surf the Net," the persona is self-consciously alone in his searching. He looks at himself in the mirror of the monitor and admits, "deep in virtual/ Nowhere, I see myself darkly, shadow/ Behind the march of fleeting text.// I log off, huddle with my truths." The persona in "Driving the Gauley River, Listening to the Radio," is likewise hyper-sensitive in his solitude, paying heed to his own selfconscious shaping of experience. He sings along with a "maudlin" mountain song...

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