cover image Endless Threshold

Endless Threshold

Jack Hirschman. Curbstone Press, $10.95 (123pp) ISBN 978-1-880684-00-9

These poems address political and social issues ranging from the exhibition of an irreverent portrait of the mayor of Chicago to the Gulf war. The voice is often emotional and the speaker usually outraged by the real injustices (e.g., racism or government corruption) and cruelties (e.g., the abuse of women) in our society, but the poems fail to analyze the complications inherent in their subjects. Hirschman's politics, sometimes just plain hermetic, remains on the gut level: ``America, you night / of bats and rocks / and garbage under / your white sheets.'' The more personal poems alternate between sentimentality and bad taste: ``She is a languid mouth / making up / before my cock / with a hundred lipsticks . . . .'' Hirschman's ( The Bottom Line ) language, rough, off-the-cuff, slightly bitter, is reminiscent of Philip Levine's, but his poems are technically amateurish: ``We will not know, we've been told, who they are, / the sons and daughters of the working class.'' Like much poetry of this century designed with political intent, this work is drenched in self-indulgence but lacks originality. (June)