Ira Sadoff . Barter. University of Illinois Press, 2003.
David St. John. Prism. Arctos Press, 2002.

                                      Ned Balbo

       
          In the collection Palm Reading in Winter (1978), Ira Sadoff writes, "This obsession with fame/as religion, whose star will rise/and whose will fall, who’ll be saved/after death and who we’ll throw away.../I say let the lilies fight it out/with the gazelle for the tall grass,/the lion would trample them both." In the twenty-five years since, Sadoff has left this debate–whose star will rise or fall–to others, intent instead on evolving a literary voice that is distinctive, idiomatic, approachable, and humane. Barter, his newest collection, crackles with energy and surprise, steeped in the strategies of both the cinema and Language poetry: lively, varied syntax hurls toward unexpected places as if resisting its own transience through speed. The poem "Nature" declares its independence from conventional narrative–"In the old days there were characters/and settings"–while also distancing itself from the lyric’s preoccupations: "Everybody’s sick//of naming a few familiar birds and trees/whose dilemmas are just like ours..." Instead, Sadoff will carve out new ground, rushing headlong into the future, pursued by history, yet determined "to attach [himself] to something." Throughout Barter and in particular poems, identity is fluid–one speaker’s "tattooed damaged look" wrongly marks him "a Vietnam vet"–yet any other self is inaccessible at best, both a historical construction and mostly interior awareness:

...who you are

is a secret to everyone, that’s American
as being an exception, believing in

your own invention...

Music is a subject always close to Sadoff’s heart: we hear, especially, of how jazz "spoke to" his younger self, its improvisational lines unfolding a syntax all their own, the gifts of "Bird and Diz" both soundtrack and revitalizing resource. At times, Sadoff revisits the semiotic game, struck not by the disjunction between signified and sign but by the power of language to overtake perception–by "how "paper-thin" the "literal poppies seem." Still, for Sadoff, long committed to social justice, mere philosophy or theory won’t suffice; his poems, as art and labor, must return "to the shattered/ordinary...the waking factory" beyond "a barrage of words." Sadoff seeks that point where the personal and political meet; he looks directly at what few could bear without art’s consolation. When "Pain pulls up its dress," the effect is anything but seductive: what you see, "if not husband and wife is a Serbian hit squad." Finally, "Iran/Iraq" holds special relevance today: "the whole history of men and women,/if we knew them as individuals" requires us to speak of what leaves real children dead: "why not mention the milk factory/bombed to oblivion...?" Sadoff’s concern for those left helpless, a constant thread throughout his work, is only one more reason for its enduring value. In Barter, he uses strategies beyond those of traditional narrative without losing his sense of humor or commitment to human welfare.
          Like David St. John’s Terraces of Rain (1991), its poems presented side by side with Antoine Predock’s Italian sketchbook, Prism, too, combines the work of author and visual artist in a volume both provocative and moving. Lance Patigian’s treated photographs deepen and clarify St. John’s themes: the threat and promise of eros, the quest for ecstatic states, the tentative, imperfect ways that people reach out to each other. A real prism breaks down white light into its constituent spectrum, while through this literary prism the bright rays of poems emerge, lyric/narrative flashes never longer than a page, further clarified by Patigian’s sharp eye. St. John left the selection of Prism’s sixteen photographs to the collective verdict of artist, designer, and publisher; he and Patigian worked separately, regularly sharing work, but without planning specific connections of photos and text. The result is, quite simply, stunning: Patigian’s images–from the web-like metallic light along the bottom of a pool, to waves cutting an orange coast, computer- or video-enhanced–are cool and colorful, formally thoughtful, often disconcerting: the perfect complement to richly textured poems.
          As usual, this poet’s work reveals impressive range, even within the self-imposed constraints of Prism’s shorter forms. Like Sadoff, St. John has a sense of humor, reminding us in "Woody" that "...it’s not at all/What you think" but, in fact, only the nickname for the iconic station wagon, "...sides panelled/In banana-yellow wood..."; or, in another poem, "...[A]lmost everything in the Sixties/Looked better under black light//Certainly his shitty room with its posters...." The way that Sadoff turns to jazz, St. John relies on rock, both as a touchstone of the past and for its promise of redemption: at Iowa’s Deadwood, "...a brassy light radiating through the entire//bar," a "glowing jukebox" offers "Norman [Dubie]" a respite-on-request: "Man for/Chrissakes will you just play P3." Though Robert Hass has called St. John’s work "not just gorgeous...[but] go-for-broke gorgeous," fewer readers have noticed how widely the poet employs plain language, whether to set off "gorgeous" passages or to add range to his palette, the above passages all examples, as well as the following:

You could see the sign for miles along
The roadside advertising its special favors

For any traveller weary of the business
Of the world...

St. John’s ear may well be flawless, yet his always-evolving vision amounts to far more than a style. Prism’s narratives are brief–swift flashes into lives or moments as St. John’s travellers negotiate escape from their aloneness, whether through sex, art, friendship, travel, or memory, or through some heightened, transcendent state. "Blood Oranges" traces one of many such heightened moments, the fruit "incongruous" in morning’s silence, on a terrace in winter wind, where a rowboat’s "peculiar clang...marks off the time one/Believes is passing..." Ultimately, Prism is a book of many colors containing the "...rapturous spectrum of/Pain by which we know the hues//Of our passage"; but even as we create this increasingly "complicated palette...the rage of the new day again coaxes us alive."