The Return of Narrative Poetry

Woessner continuedfrom previous page Di posits a duality between love, that drugs the body so that it loses its way, and the soul of the poet, which must remain constant for the lover to survive. "Heart" now is not a symbol for the sublime, but rather is just another part of the body that the soul must struggle to contain. This might seem like a gloss on the nonconformist sexuality of the hippies or the Beats, but it is neither Western nor so simple. Di seems to be tapping another spiritual vein when he writes: Soul may need several bodily destructions. Body's torment doesn't become soul's, but remains in the body's suffering.... For all my attempts at explication, such lines as "being / loved makes love / desperate, makes us desperate" remain elusive, like the stags, foxes, and birds that run and fly through these poems and vanish in the mist. The title page credits five translators with assistance from five more. The Chinese text is provided. I found the English graceful ifnot always grammatical , or punctuated. Still, as committee projects go, Another Kind ofTenderness is a lyrical success. Warren Woessner 's most recent collection ofpoetry, Our Hawk, has beenpublished as a Toothpaste Press chapbook by Coffee House Press. The Return of Narrative Poetry Kevin Prüfer Bent to the Earth Bias Manuel De Luna Carnegie Mellon University Press http://www.cmu.edu/universitypress/ 64 pages; paper, $13.95 I believe there's no better way to take the pulse of the new generation ofAmerican poets than by editing a literary magazine. At Pleiades, I sort through about fifteen thousand poems a year, mostly by emerging poets, and feel, more than is perhaps healthy for a writer, especially attuned to the many fluctuating trends and fads inAmerican poetry. Over the last decade, for instance, I've watched straight narrative go out of style (unless your poem coyly interrogates the idea ofnarrative). Confessionalism, too, is passé (unless you, like D. A. Powell, can couch it in brilliant, linguistic pyrotechnics). Earnestness is, like Patrick Swayze or leg warmers, totally out. There was once a time, though—back when I first discovered poetry—when a sort ofconfessional, earnest narrative poem was cool. This was long ago, an era today's crop ofMFA students must regard with misty, retro sentimentality or aloofscorn. Sometimes, sifting through one winking, fragmented post-Ashbery exercise after another, I despair of those days ever returning. This all seemed especially a shame as I read Bias Manuel De Luna's earnest, confessional, largely narrative collection ofpoems, for Bent to the Earth is an outstanding first book, one that probably won't receive nearly the attention it deserves. Like many first books of poetry, Bent to the Earth is divided neatly into three roughly equal parts, each of which deals with a variation on a theme, in this case, violence and loss. In the first section, De Luna concentrates on what I take to be his own family , their arrival from Mexico, and the discouraging and violent lives of other immigrants struggling to make it over the border, to find work and a few simple comforts. De Luna returns to family violence in the third section of the book, focusing more closely on his younger brother's death in a traffic accident. The middle part, which takes a broader look at violence and death, is a little less carefully focused, though the quality of the poems remains strong. But, before I discuss what makes De Luna's writing so good, I'd like to get a few of its shortcomings out of the way. Bent to the Earth is not a perfect book and contains a few poems that are really quite bad. While De Luna is adept at a sort of straightforward , deceptively plainspoken narrative, his few more outwardly lyrical attempts mostly creak on rusty hinges. Take, for example, the opening stanza of "To Hear the Leaves Sing," a poem typical of De Luna's failures: Going down Highway 99, to Modesto, I see an orange glow in the sky. At first I think it is a fire, but, as I get closer, it is the lights of...