ACTS OF LOVE

Parents and kids, pride and political fear, abuse and recovery from abuse make recurrent themes for Silex's fluent and punctuationless free verse, a style halfway between Lucille Clifton (one of Silex's mentors) and W.S. Merwin. Religious language flows freely here—"everyone seeks/ what is sacred," he writes, "to be rid/ of the evil born in us." Openhearted in the presence of children but enraged at the injustice of adults, Silex's speaker seems to have survived particular evils; several poems mention self-destructive impulses (self cutting, the suicide of a friend) and pay tribute to the grandparents who raised him. Other works examine large-scale sufferings, from the Rwandan genocide to the travails of migrant laborers. Born in El Paso, now teaching at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Silex shows particular attraction to the resilient folkways of Native Americans, though Latino, Palestinian and African-American subjects get a look-in as well. Adapting Western forms to global concerns ("Aubade," "Ode with a Lament") Silex (Through All the Displacements ) can succumb to cliché ("the only choice/ children have is to make laughter and play") or to left-wing platitude ("forty thousand children die/ each day because of words/ like free markets democracy"). Silex's sophomore volume nevertheless ably fuses personal testimony with multicultural history, asking "how many contradictions it takes/ to bring one human into being." (June)