Selected Poems

This small personal sampler of 25 years of McClure's work has an earnest and programmatic quality to it. An ecological romantic with Marxist tendencies, McClure juxtaposes the evil of politics with the virtue of what he calls ""biology,'' a kind of ideal, Lawrentian natural order. Strident and morally didactic, many of his poems read like political or religious chants. As he states it, the poem has value more ``as an extension of myself, as a gesture,'' than as a text per sea theory that leads inexorably to self-indulgence and excess. McClure is enamored of splashy upper-case interjections and multiple exclamation points, but the effect is somewhat quaint and endearing. He writes of one of his own poems: ``It is comprised, as our cells are, of Pleistocene hunts and toy umbrellas.'' Cute, yes, but quintessential McClure. (March)