Old Tombs

Catchment, Thomas Reiter's tenth collection of poems, is his best. Many poets at his stage in their careers are running on the fumes of earlier success, but Reiter's oeuvre keeps expanding and deepening. A high percentage of his work is set in the Caribbean, where he has been a frequent visitor for many years and a serious student of the islands' troubled history. His work would never be mistaken for Laurence Lieberman's or Derek Walcott's, two other poets who draw on the islands, because much of his originality derives from his vision of the world as falling apart or quite literally in decay.

The people he is attracted to are often those who pick up the pieces and rebuild, who hold life together. I can't recall another poet who has this healthy obsession. It provides him with interesting situations and personae like the woman in "Hosanna Walk" who creates sculpture, shoes, and tote bags from scraps left on the side of a dormant volcano. Art, Reiter seems to be demonstrating, comes out of the necessity to repair the world. Even the cemetery worker in "How Blyden Lynch Came Back to Perpetual Care" is an artist of sorts:

What the rain and winds mar, he mends:levering and jacking up the walls of old tombs that have shifted out of truefrom the time sorrow placed them there; endingwith trowel swipes feathered out, the faultsmade ready with a fine-bristled brush.

"Perpetual care" might even describe Reiter's attitude toward his craft, since it hints at his accuracy of language. Note the subtle dialect in "shifted out of true" in the lines above. As in his previous books, one never has the sense in Catchment of a metaphor pushed too far, a sentence forced to carry a clause too many, or an attack of adjectivitis in which most of the nouns come with modifiers attached. Alert to poetic fads that quickly metamorphose into clichés, Reiter is never the star of his poems, doesn't confess to a host of inadequacies, failures, and traductions, and eschews the intellectual Band-Aids of new age "theology." There's nothing here from the Weekend Poetry Getaway. Instead he steps back and lets the work speak for itself.

Another distinguishing characteristic is his knowledge of local flora, which he doesn't merely name but presents so that the reader sees them indelibly. Thus "Bearded Fig":

In a fork of Antillean cedaror the crown of a mountain palm, anycatchment for soil gathered by the tradewinds from other islands, from Africa—

the seed of a bearded fig'sa colonist in the canopy and stayswithin itself for a hundred years'journey to the ground. Its flowers

radiant as breastplates, leaveslike quills in an inkwell for entriesin the ledgers of the New World,like rooster tails from Jet Skis.

Aside from the clarity seen throughout Catchment, one notices how much Caribbean history is summarized in that last sentence. It is rare enough these days to find an American poet writing about history, and rarer yet to be taken to out-of-the-way places like Dominica, St. Vincent, and St. Kitts. Reiter regales his readers with lore: "Didn't Carib Indians kill missionaries / by wafting oleander smoke into rectories?" Two writers who come to mind while reading Catchment are Joseph Conrad and Paul Theroux. In a frightening poem such as "Angelology, Dominica," a dangerous young man terrifies a shopgirl he fancies by showing up as "The Lord God's angel," complete with pyrotechnic effects. "The King of Redonda," an islet composed largely of bird guano, turns out to be a young American graduate of a low-residency mfa program in creative writing, his only employment being caretaker of the island's closed guano mines, once a profitable source of fertilizer.

Such poems demonstrate Reiter's range. At times he will insert among the Caribbean narratives a poem about the New Jersey pine barrens or the present-day Mississippi River. He...