National Anthem
Starred Review. Anyone with doubts about the place of politics in poetry should have this book thrust in his hands. Prufer (Fallen from a Chariot) makes the political personal and the personal political, all in the service of sinuous, moving free verse. He has a rare gift for bringing the inanimate to life on the page. The American West becomes a drifter on a raft, his chest brown and flecked with hair, and the title poem begins with a shopping center calling out like a lover. Elsewhere, ancient Rome, its empire in slow, steady decline, is found curled on a pew, asleep, a haunting parallel for contemporary America. Poetry—a possible source of salvation?—is a boy locked in a car's trunk, screaming and refusing to die. And there are people in these poems, too: a speaker who writes love notes he describes as empty and vaguely/ sad. Dead children, soldiers and those left behind in an evacuation speak and are spoken about. An absurdly large parachute falls over a suburb, and the speaker writes letters to his lover while trying to find his way out from under it. Near the end of the book, Prufer writes, I don't know what to do/ with the doomed, the chilled over and gone,/ but drink until my fingers become twigs. This powerful collection, Prufer's fourth, is an ongoing elegy for a dark time in American history(Feb.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.