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BOOK REVIEWS Self and the City Fred Muratori Into It Lawrence Joseph Farrar. Straus and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com 80 pages; cloth. $22.00 Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993 Lawrence Joseph Farrar, Straus, and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com 192 pages; paper, $16.00 The title of Lawrence Joseph's fourth and latest poetry collection. Into It, echoes words from Henry James's assertion that "the only thing" is "to live in the world of creation — to get into it and stay in—to frequent it and haunt it...." Like Wallace Stevens, Joseph balances the vocation of law with the avocation of poetry, so he knows a thing or two about engagement with the external world and the complex role language plays in determining the social perceptions and balances of power within it. "I've become / too clear-sighted — ," he writes in "Rubaiyat," a recent poem, "the mechanics of power / are too transparent." An Arab-American raised in working-class Detroit and a longtime resident ofManhattan, Joseph has witnessed and lived life at street-level. In the wake of his mentor, James Boyd White, who championed "the poetics of law" — the application of literary textual analysis to legal decisions and opinions—Joseph understands firsthand how legal language no less than the language of poetry represents less a stable reflection of authoritative truth than a commitment to a way of envisioning the world. He is acutely aware of the gulfbetween the officially sanctioned, abstract rhetoric that expresses an ideal societal vision and the diminished inner voice of the disillusioned citizenry in whom that vision has been instilled: The immense enlargement of our perspectives is confronted by a reduction in our powers of action, which reduces a voice to an inner voice inclined to speak only to those closest to us.... The effect of powerlessness, the consciousness of it, produces a form of anti-rhetoric, rhetoric's covert opposite: a reticent language of intimacy. From his first collection, 1983's Shouting at No One (among the three earlier volumes reprinted in Codes Precepts, Biases, and Taboos), through Into It. Joseph addresses that powerlessness. as well as urban violence, poverty, racism, injustice, and moral paralysis from the perspective of an individual consciousness trying to comprehend and define the harshly imbalanced society he sees before him. His diction is unadorned, unrhetoricized. as if the specter of Dragnet's Detective Joe Friday were standing over him whispering Just the facts. But unlike many postmodem poets whose theoretical positions deny or at least minimize the value and validity of the self as an autonomous, creative agent, preferring instead to regard the appearance of poetic agency as an interstitial knot of externally determined values. Joseph resists affecting self-effacement to the point of absence. And while he has acknowledged that "language reflects a self, subject, which partly exists in the human and social realities it expresses" ("Theories of Poetry. Theories of Law." Vanderbilt Law Review, 1 993), much depends on the word "partly." Identifying with the modernists, he maintains that the poet's subjective authorial self, no matter how decentered or unobtrusive, persists within the "form and texture" of the poem itself. A "Lawrence Joseph"—even if he exists as a negotiable entity between writer and reader, a contractual self— lives in these poems. Much of the territory explored in Joseph's earlier work follows the broken sidewalks of Philip Levine's Detroit. He accompanies the reader on a tour through the violent and neglected neighborhoods of his youth, revealing dead factories, closed markets, empty churches, vacant lots, the violated city: I pass... a block-long building, windows knocked in, wires ripped from the walls, toilet bowls covered with dirt and spiderwebs. It is a documentarían's vision, and despite references to green water and yellow smoke, it's difficult not to picture Joseph's cityscapes in colors other than black, white, and gray. But the vision is deeply personal as well; the poet's habitat inhabits him. Detroit's troubled history is a burden that perpetually haunts him: In dreams I run through streets terrified, away from mouths that hate me. my face washed with fear. In dreams I kill so...

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