Butterfly Effect (National Poetry Series Books)
Hardly longer than a chapbook with just over 40 pages of poetry, Humes's tenth collectionAselected by Pattiann Rogers for the "National Poetry" seriesArarely strays from the homey terrain of family, house, and garden. In plain-spoken, lyric meditations, these poems exemplify the writing workshop methodology that has prevailed at universities for two decades: select a mundane, autobiographical event ("Counting the Plants," "My Daughter Gives Me Her Autographed Baseball") or common object ("Onions," "Nails"), describe it with a simple and solemn grace, then vault toward some felt but indefinable intimation of one's place in the cosmos. To Humes's credit, he is skillful at this modest and familiar strategy, but the connections between the mundane and the profound can seem forced, as when the narrator, fishing, wishes for "one fish of such heft/ that my life would be forever after/ set in the arc of its power." While they strive to conjure "the plain sense of things" and generally evince a deep respect for life in its less exotic manifestations, the poems present a vision in which "the horizon barely stirs" with either humor or the surprise of a stimulated imagination in sudden flight.AFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NYCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.