Counting the Black Angels

In these reflections on childhood and family, Roberts ( Sweet Ones ) writes of Catholic schooling and its effect on life in language that remains matter-of-fact and conversational. The black angels, a focus of potential and actual sin, enter the lives of Roberts and his family: two brothers and his father (a road man for a bread company) and mother, a textile stitcher. Many of the poems recreate parochial school, as in ``The Way of the Cross'' with its ``twenty-two eleven-year-olds lifting heavy crosses of air onto our shoulders, / balancing them there as we staggered around the empty seats.'' In ``Emma in the Class on Reproduction'' a Sister stares ``at easy Emma / who spread her knees at lunch and showed her underpants.'' Adolescence is endowed permanently with power by the sexuality in poems such as ``This and That,'' ``Love on Lonesome Drive Road,'' and ``Learning Natural Instincts.'' Another theme Roberts develops is his relationship with his father, a drunk, and with his mother, who is unfaithful to his father. There are strong poems about each, particularly ``He's Alone'' and ``The Cowboy,'' but the pain he feels in regard to his mother is less well delineated. In fact, Roberts fails to explore fully what sin is for him. Instead, he sometimes blames himself for being alive. In the powerful ``Killing Jesus'' he is in class, and at the same time imagines himself with the lance at the Crucifixion. Here and elsewhere, insight is winnowed from self-accusation, rescued by the strengths of his craft. (May)