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Absence." In the last ("Vine") section, "Mothers in the Park," "Song for Aging Children," and "The Diviner" all keep the promise made by the first poem in that section, one entitled "For an Old Friend." This poem, with its startling yet satisfying vine image {" . . . we sang/ old sunless ballads,/ our voices intertwining /green and thoughtless/ as two summer vines"), hints at a rich development and exploration to come, a richness which, for me, never fully emerges. In contrast, the central section ("Stalk") offers many rewarding poems, with "Legacy," "Sunday Storm, "I Remember , and "On Winter Ground" at the forefront. What I find disappointing—particularly when I have come across an image as vivid as that of the intertwining vinevoices —is Odom's failure to achieve more often or more consistently the freshness and vigor represented by that image, the sense of one absolutely right word following necessarily upon another . Although these poems do not lack similies and metaphors, scenes and characters , it is not these that linger in the mind, nor is there a lasting sense of idiom or idosyncrasy; what remains is rather an awareness of the author's predilection , amounting to a passion, for adjectives. Take, for example, Odom's addiction to the pattern found in Blake's famous line, "In England's green & pleasant Land," such that we find "Upon a green and troubled ocean," "in this cold and faithless hour," "of your blue/ and ragged fire"—all within the space of five pages (26-30). Odom's preference for adjectives over images, for prettiness over precision, for sugar over substance left me hungry for her stronger, surer, more musical voice—the rarer voice that wells up, for instance, in the final image of "Skating Lessons": "... we speed off/down a sidewalk/ we've made/ smoother/ than a pigeon's wing." Her love of the pretty (or prettifying) shows up also, writ large, in the persona of Blossom, Stalk & Vine, where we find a tendency to reach for easy sentimentality ("For Two Black Students Sleeping [Second Period, English 10]," "Teachers : Please Drop This Student From Your Roll"), a distracting, even coy selfconsciousness ("For the Friend Reading This Poem," "Keeping the Music Free"), a lack of trust in language and reader which leads to the sort of hyperbole one rejects out of hand ("Every morning/ every night/ I polish/ . . . this cool/ . . . glass"). Again, such lapses are the more noticeable when set against a poem such as "She Recalls Her Mother's Dying": December light across a bitter ocean, a scattering of foam like white frost on the sand; salt sting of gray wind heavy with gray water; gray miles of shore, no footprints but my own. While I often found the perfume of Blossom, Stalk & Vine too sweet for my taste, searching among the leaves, I found fruits to reward me, too, and feel sure that other readers will as well. —Jane Wilson Joyce Allen, M. Ray. The Roads I Travel. Nightshade Press (PO Box 76, Troy, Maine, 04987), 1990. $5.00. The nineteen poems in M. Ray Allen's chapbook, as his title suggests, are the work of a man in motion. Like Jack Kerouac, to whose memory the poems are dedicated, Allen is on the road, "South of Toledo," "East of Tucson," "Driving to Catawba." The way Allen 68 covers the geography between San Francisco and the hills of east Kentucky (he juxtaposes San Francisco and east Kentucky in "DiMaggio Smiles") is characteristically American: we traverse great distances, both literally and imaginatively , creating in our experience and in our artistic renderings of our experience, what might be termed "American space." (Europeans are apt to observe that, in contrast to Americans, they think a one-hundred-year-old house is modern but a hundred miles is a great distance, while we Americans think a one-hundred -year-old house is old and a hundred miles is no distance at all.) Allen's movement through space is both literal and a metaphor for a movement in time. To go forward, he goes "backward into those hills" of east Kentucky , his home, "to dig at memories/ pressed hard/ like coal seams between rock" ("Backward Into Those Hills"). In "The Dead," "Pick...

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