Pursuit of a Wound: Poems

""How little it took to turn me sentimental. How little it takes me still."" Verbatim dialogue, laconic musings, self-interruptions, givings-up and quiet goings-on all mark Lea's seventh collection, following the new & selected To the Bone, the well-received novel A Place in Mind and the naturalist essays of Hunting the Whole Way Home. Lea's plainspoken New England voice has benefited from its multi-genre development, making the poems here easy in diction, resistant to lyric flights and focused on making sense of things. As he notes above, however, the poet refuses to deny his more emotive side, which is alternately a strength and a weakness here. It is what lays behind the restless political energy of ""Our Camp '63 (""the fucked-up notion that a summer church day camp allowed/ us to do something to help a nation in its narcosis rectify/ the deaths, countless, in bilge-watery choleric slave ships and what followed// and follows "") but is also behind the many rigid attempts at giving the poems a sense of closure, as when ""Authority"" talks of a storekeeper who would ""wave his flipper and talk on local matters/ (though he'd never let the meat get overcooked)"" and ends ""Full above our river, the moon appears/ authoritative. Grins from ear to ear."" The verse's scaled-back ambitions at such moments nevertheless give Lea's everyday characters--""Mack"" on a visit to ""the fancy new clinic""; ""the warden cop and vet"" who all report ""the coon must be destroyed""; ""thousands of pumpkins in Wally Morse's fields""; and the poet himself among many others--credible voices and fittingly modest appeal. (June)