Tug

Comments Booker ( Waves & license ) in ``Requiem,'' ``How / Very sweet I would be seen as being / If willing to drop what takes guts to cite--'', and indeed, this is a challenging book. The writer is an inmate on Florida's death row, but his imagination is unconfined, ranging far both spatially and temporally. In ``Wisdom,'' he remembers as a kid in Brooklyn chasing and abusing a shoeless Jewish man: ``We kids hurried back to our own hometurf, / Back to the things we cared about and knew. / And you know what . . . ? It was good to be home. / It was good to have homes, shoes.'' In the chilling ``The Wrong Boy,'' Booker describes in the first person a man hunting down his great grandfather's lynchers: ``They had all worn that same questioning, / Quizzical sort of look near to where just / Before when I cured them, of everything.'' The poems chart both sides of violence, racism and despair. No wonder Booker imagines critics to be ``entrapped by the fury / Eking out of my pen,'' or that ``jongleurs of an oblique critique / Had me metaphored into something paused, / Although my aim was straight and true.'' His poetry is written without allegiances, speaking openly ``about things not to be said aloud'' and ``unawed by the thawed out realities / that shine in from afar.'' (May)