The Chaos of Coca

??G?? Smith continuedfrom previous page to poet-friends as brothers and sisters. Among these poems are: "Requiem," for Kenneth Rexroth, "To Gary Snyder," "ToAdrienne Rich," "To John Logan from La Push," "To Hayden Carruth," "To Hayden Carruth on His Eightieth Birthday," and "To Yoshinaga Sayuri." Written in a heartfelt, conversational style, these are personal letters meant to be shared. Like good talk between friends, they typically take on the spirit and style of the poet addressed. His recent poem "Rising" renders the life context of those he admires: I think of Yesenin at the doctor's, finding the old woman whose legs were blue, Akhmatova so solemn at the gates, Tu Fu huddled over his charcoal stove, trying to thaw his fingers enough to hold his writing brush. Bashö listened in the silence to ice crack his rice jar. The sky is slate white—a chalkboard erased ten thousand times. Hamill honors both the work and the life of those he admires, and we are privileged to overhear his spoken respect. His 33-page "Pisan Canto" takes Pound's methods and makes them his own. Hamill is an American Zen Buddhist at heart, becoming one with his experience, draining away the rationalized hierarchy of our ways. There is much wit in long and short poems, as in "Seattle Spring" "After ninety-four / consecutive days of rain, / even frogs don't sing." His images are unerringly true and concise, as in the book's final poem, "After a Winter of Grieving": The April moon was full and high, almost big enough to burst, haloed by a ring of sparkling light and a few bright stars. The garden Buddha, a pretty boy, wore an apron of moss. The final lines of this poem explain the book's title and vision: Paradise is a sometime thing, wherever one might make it— a river of stones, bamboo, a foreign tree, building a home alone— and this same old moon, eternally new in geological time. The road to Kage-an is gone. Don't ask me where I've been. The road out is the road in. Though one hopes for many more poems to come, this book by a seasoned traveler is a fine riprap of stones stacked along the trail for us and standing clear in the rain and sun. Larry Smith is a poet and professor emeritus at Bowling Green State University's Firelands College . He directs Bottom Dog Press and coedited with Ray McNiece their recent anthology American Zen: A Gathering of Poets. The Chaos of Coca Amy Sayre-Roberts Queen Cocaine Nuria Amat Translated by Peter Bush City Lights http://www.citylights.com 225 pages; paper, $13.95 Nuria Amat's Queen Cocaine is a reader's walk through water. Prepare to surrender to the heavy-limbed prose. Breathe deeply and fill your lungs with words weighted to drown readers in their sorrow. In this profound novel, Amat draws back a curtain to reveal a rare view of life in a remote Columbian village where "[njature was rich. But she alone." Set in an area long bloodied by civil war, this is no typical tale of Columbian drug traffic ; you will not meet kingpins or addicts. It is an outsider's view into the souls of coca's most humble victims—her countrymen. Come with nothing and learn as you move through this dark, lyric fiction made all the more poignant by implicit truth. You will not regret it. Rat, a young Catalan woman, meets Wilson Cervantes in Bogatá, and follows him to his home, the coastal Bahía Negra, a place to be confused with some layer of hell if not for the relentless presence of rain. Amat's alternating use of tense from first to third person underscores Rat as an alien to this culture as well as to herself. Through her eyes, we witness the struggle of the marginalized mestizo and black populations caught in the crossfire of the cocaine wars. Once fishermen and farmers, there is no value left in their trades; only coca has worth. With neither power nor political voice to protect them, they carry their apprehension like a shield to survive the varied...