More Daring Escapes, and: Practice (review)

"False words are not only evil in themselves," Plato wrote, "but they infect the soul with evil." In this first decade of the new century, in which the infection of the lie has become commonplace, I look for sustenance in poems that body forth our detailed, multifarious, human truths. Both Steven Huff's and Dan Bellm's books resemble each other in setting a high benchmark, and the two books are also similar in structure. Both order their poems in topical sections, and both include a section that is an extended sequence.

I'm drawn to Huff's second collection, More Daring Escapes, which Thom Ward says confronts "the wondrous, suffocating knowledge that work, and work alone, is the only means to whatever we call salvation on this earth." The section called "Travail" is a tour-de-force sequence that lays bare the sinew and bone weariness of the worker in "that damned shirt factory," who concludes that

… There's a chain

there somewhere, I can feel it snaking around

my leg, but I'm afraid to look.

In vivid, harrowing detail, Huff renders the hard truths of work's ruthlessness as it existed in the preceding century and still exists in this one. But he is a poet of wise understanding who recognizes in what is arduous the earthy presence of spirit. The laborer bludgeoned by fatigue glimpses the complement to this pain when he sees

… the Spirit in a spill on the table, the sigh

of shoes on the sod.

Good God, bad God.

Huff writes this section in sturdy, "common man" language, but he is also a master of articulating the whimsical and amusing. In the final section called "Alabaster," "The Facts" takes three pages, and I wouldn't wish it shortened even a whit. His talent for lyric also appears in several litanies, or "list" poems, one cataloging "miracle workers" who have let him off various hooks, and another the moving "A Bestiary of Continuous Extinctions," in which Huff intones the names of extinct species, and imagines in their going his own.

Are you taking me with you, blue

indigo goat fly? Where are we going ruby-tusked Madagascar boar?

Reviewers are supposed to both laud and critique. The one fault in this book is the fact that I can't find any fault in it. Huff's articulateness and gentle, self-deprecating humor deliver line after line of soul food, and I want to sit with him and "watch the city turn to alabaster."

Bellm prepares us for Practice with an introduction that describes the book as midrash, the ancient practice of "imaginatively explaining or expanding the Old Testament text beyond its apparent literal meaning." This introduction predisposes us to read the collection as a testament of the spiritual life, and it is. In the first section, in which he renders the voice of the supplicant in a poem addressing his mother's decline, he refers to God as "No One."

Tell me—No One—now that, mother to son,

no more remembrance is to be allowed …

Sometimes we sit

and lose our memory together,

I can almost stop presuming I

am here….

The poems in section 2, which addresses gay/lesbian reality, are some of the most moving in the book. Bellm asks the agonizing questions. "How do we forgive ourselves for what / we haven't done?" In "Portal," on a bus with "this friend I had loved seven years," Bellm writes,

I was ready to be frightened

and took his hand and held

my breath, and felt my soul leave

me and return as another still myself but

not alone …

The poems in section 3 (for instance, "Repair," "Milk," and "Sacrifice"), I want to tack to the wall so I can encounter them in the midst of going about living. "Clean" is a skillfully written villanelle in which Bellm renders a portrait of himself as the perfectionist obsessed by cleaning up after his more relaxed lover, calling himself "Miss Mr. Clean, everything just so."

The final...