Beautiful World Haunted

American«¡view Beautiful World Haunted Andrew Kozma Roam Susan B. A. Somers-Willett Southern Illinois University Press http://www.siu.edu/~siupress 96 pages; paper, $14.95 It's not often that I acquire a new book of poetry through a poem in ajournai, but that's exactly what happened with Roam. I read "The Boy Who Would Be Achilles" in the Crab Orchard Review and found a voice I identified with, who echoed the problems with language and the glories in wordplay and allusive disjunction that I was dealing with in my own writing—which means this is probably the point to tell you that this is not so much an unbiased review. Which is not to mean that I have any untoward connection to Susan B. A. Somers-Willett or have designs on being published by her press, but that I feel so connected to her aesthetic that even when she's failing in a poem, I can't help but be behind every faltering line. Her poems are often lyric, make that always lyric, and allusive. Take the first poem, "Self-Portrait as Interstate 10." The connections between lines are missing, in that the narrative is not a narrative as much as a portrait, each line, each image, like one dot of paint in a pointillist composition: at the end, there is a painting, but the closer you look at the canvas the more open spaces you see. A flock of implication. This is not exactly true. The lines "Still, the sky is the great equalizer" and "Still, I yawn into the visible: yellow sun, / shack, mountains of uncertain / range" can easily be linked under the controlling metaphor ofthe interstate or, more correctly, the "I" as Interstate. Somers-Willett's poems become an act of active reading, a game where you connect the meanings between the title and each line, each line to each other line, and those lines to other people's poems. The end of "Self-Portrait as Interstate 10" alludes to Stevie Smith, W. H. Auden, and William Carlos Williams: "not drowning, not waving, / but falling out of the sky." This isn't just a layering for the poem alone; the Williams poem alluded to provides the epigraph for the second section, even more closely relating the two poems. Roam's poems create their own worlds, their own myths, even while calling in favors from the myths of a common western culture. For each "The Boy Who Would Be Achilles" that anchors its emotion to established myth, there is a poem like "Migration" that carries emotional weight through Somers-Willett's clear images and surety of voice: Can you hear it, tumbling pell-mell out of the sky over the acid flute of altitude, over wind singing all of your holes? What is the word that repeats itself inside your body? The word that lives in your chest, that chases you into the deaf and repeating sea. Here you see the echo of Icarus, though it is only an echo. And this echo reverberates through the entire book, emerging from "Self-Portrait as Interstate 10," the second ring of "Circus Acts," and is most noticeably reworked in "Girl, 7, Seeking U.S. Flight Record, Dies in Crash." Somers-Willett shows her hand directly near the end of the book in "After Leaving the House of Minos." This poem ends the second section in metaphor, weaving together myth and reality, the epic loss and the poet's personal loss of her father. The poem ending the first section ("What the Doctors Forget to Tell You about Morphine") is a grounded exploration ofa child easing an ailing parent through the process of dying. Although the father at the end "is, for a time, an angel," this is the poet forcing imagery on the tragedy of the real, an attempt to make suffering understandable and beautiful. With "After Leaving the House ofMinos" the perspective is reversed: now mythology is brought down to the gritty, dirty earth, and, instead of being myth and holding up some higher "meaning," the suffering of Daedalus over the loss of his son is made real. His loss means nothing but loss. The...