The Million Dollar Hole

After the Vietnam War-fueled Obscenities won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1972 and then went on to sell a McKuen-like 100,000 copies in mass market paperback, Casey's work surfaced in literary journals for the next 20-odd years and then again in book form with 1996's small press Millrat. In this new volume (with an upstart Washington, D.C., press that ""reads unsolicited manuscripts and tries to publish books on their merit, both literary and commercial""), Casey's speaker relates, with a hypermasculine, quasi-Beat sensibility that is paradoxically well-controlled, the workaday inertia of the military man during peacetime: ""the bus driver is furious/ but I am bored/ I stop the bus/ and avoid the rolling Pepsi can/ I speak with a command voice/ ID cards and passes please."" Over the course of stints in the ""Outpatient Clinic, General Wood Hospital,"" in an imagined ""Nuclear Accident Reaction Force"" and a ""Chevy Two Cruiser with a Double Bubble,"" the affectless first person, aided by a total absence of punctuation, gathers momentum and resists, with some success, closure: ""and for every willie AWOL deserter brought in/ the Missouri Highway Police get a bounty/ like a devil capturing souls I say/ and John says of course/ they have sneakers or boots mostly/ not shoes."" The speaker's general ambivalence, manifest in his shifting personas--here identifying with various victimized parties, there muttering in righteous resentment--is by turns jaded and ingenuous, perspicacious and credulous, empathetic, cold-eyed and crass, as he details life on and after the base. That voice wears thin over these 62 short, plot-driven recitations, but fans of the more ornate dispatches of Bruce Weigl or Yusef Komunyakaa will find it a bracing blast from the ranks. (Feb.) Forecast: The moment of Obscenities is obviously long past, but these poems and their quiet presentation seem a dignified attempt at defusing any remaining hype. Love 'em or leave 'em.