Inventing Angels

Fincke's (The Double Negatives of the Living) poetry seems to originate in a dark place where there are no such things as angels, a fallen world of malignancy and squalor: ``We follow the route where / the street's seams have split, / where tumors of weeds / have burst the asphalt / and the vandal boards / have been stripped from /the gouged eyes of storefronts.'' The poems are filled with the inconsolable pain of illness, as the speaker often struggles to breathe: ``Lately, I've been unreasonable, / Weaning myself from a thousand / Milligrams per day of Theolair / And waking inside the mathematics / Of strangling.'' Fincke seems to be a poet of working-class Pittsburgh, raised as ``the son of nobody but a pair of people / Who sold bread and cakes to this congregation / Descended from the fisted thunderheads of lust.'' Narrative, conversational, existential, at its best playfully idiosyncratic, jam-packed with a raw energy that grabs at stories and random facts, this is a late-20th-century mind--one that sometimes can't seem to turn off the noise. The most satisfying poems address the poet's family and childhood, but the balance of the collection is disjointed and wearying, striking an abrasive political tone that denounces toxins, animal extinction and other current maladies. Overall, the relative absence of beauty and salvation in the poems may make them difficult to enjoy. (Apr.)