The Ocean Inside Kenji Takezo

With a powerful, quiet grace and a delicate intellectual balance, Noguchi tells a particular, recognizable life in the metaphor of surfing. In everyday language-not a hip, faux-vernacular surferspeak-this California-raised poet offers 46 easygoing takes on the thrills, spills and ironies of the life of a young earnest, dreamy surfer named Kenji Takezo. For teenage Kenji, lost in the deeps of puberty, the waxed surface of the surfboard becomes a constant. Suddenly on a dance floor with a girl, for instance, Kenji ""does the only thing/ He can do as the girl/ To whom he is speaking/ Rises in the manner of a wave./ He surfs./ It is an involuntary response/ To stand on his board,/ This dance floor."" Noguchi's world is also transhistorical. His sunkissed, aquamarine architectures of sand and saltwater arise from a preternatural Pacific Coast, one not necessarily linked to California or, for that matter, America. Poems in the third of the four sections revolve around Japanese legend, from which Noguchi surfs, dazzlingly, into poems about Kenji's earlier childhood experiences. One of these, ""Lost Under the Ocean After Falling Off a Wave,"" seamlessly blends the underwater experience of not knowing which way is up with the breathless terror of a child's being lost in a supermarket. In these direct, unpretentious poems, Noguchi makes the most of his metaphor without making too much of it. This collection won of the 1995 Associated Writing Program's Award Series in Poetry. (Nov.)