The Alamo

Versatile, prolific and ambitious, Lind is a staff writer at the New Yorker, author of heavyweight works of political journalism (Up from Conservatism; The Next American Nation) and a novelist (Powertown). Before any of that, however, back in 1984, he began a poem about the Alamo. Twelve years later, Lind presents this masterly 6000-line narrative epic. It takes the form of 12 ""books,"" each of which is composed of roughly 70 metered and rhymed seven-line stanzas and introduced by a one-page argument presented in rhymed couplets. Lind is remarkably faithful to the form he has set for himself, but that rigor, which can become tedious, is tempered by welcome gusts of vernacular language. To the Homeric battlefield Lind sometimes brings a visual sense that makes a reader think of Sam Peckinpah: ""The fog unravels. But this is no fog,/ this blear amalgam of a scumbled dust/ and stinging fumes. An isolated leg,/ wrapped like a maize ear in a tattered husk/ of trouser cotton, glows in noonday dusk./ A headless soldier bows; the freckling paint/ has made his gulping pal a stigmaed saint."" The narrative begins, classically, in medias res, and proceeds via flashbacks and forward leaps to tell the story of the Alamo and to paint the world in which the battle occurred. There are allusions to history and the stars; by names (""the Tennessean,"" ""white-skinned Cherokee""), natural history (the origin of mustangs, ""dogged spirits of the plains"") and lengthy orations. Davey Crockett, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, General Santa Anna and William Travis, the hero, appear in heroic postures but also in their human frailty, as do dozens of lesser players, both Mexican and Texan. Two appendixes, an essay on epic and one on heroic verse, offer Lind's apologia. They're interesting but unnecessary. The work speaks for itself. As a poem, as a narrative and as an effort at adapting a classical art form to the task of illuminating history, The Alamo is unforgettable. (Mar.)