Why Speak?

This verse debut from novelist Bellows (On This Day) might look familiar to those who admire his fiction: it's clear, bleak, detailed, full of pathos and largely concerned with coming of age in rural Maine. Farms, forests and fields provide stark backgrounds for characters who struggle both to fit in with, and to stand apart from, their families: ""We ate from the garden till it was spent, then/ threw its left-behinds at each other-failures/ still in their beds, scabbed over with saltmarsh hay."" Such lines represent Bellows at his confident, articulate best, neither a rhyming formalist nor a plain-style writer, and one instead able to apply the resources of the American language to a frustration that seems peculiar to New England. Other work may sound too talky, or too close to prose, as in one of five poems based on paintings by Howard Pyle in which, ""The captain will pay for his mistreatment of those who once admired him."" Toward the end of the collection come poems set in Boston and New York, and poems about other paintings, poems whose sophistication makes Bellows sound happier, but perhaps less powerful. Long unrhymed lines link past to present, Winslow Homer to 21st-century Brooklyn, fashioning a style which may not seem entirely his own, but which should keep readers attentive anyway.