Boneshepherds

The violence of young men, the tenderness of old guitars, the tribulations and the glories of Filipino and multiracial American heritage collide and combine in the forceful and passionate elegies, geographies, and love poems that make up Rosal’s third book. “Man Hanging Upside Down” follows “ragtag blackbirds” to an updated Golgotha; “Sundiata Elegy” remembers the poet Sekou Sundiata by way of encounters in Puerto Plata, where “None of us belongs anywhere/ without love.” Compared to My American Kundiman (2006), the laments, odes, and brief, story-driven verse here may often seem, at first, more conventional, though no less vivid for it. Rosal has a way with opening lines (“We lived down the block from a stockpile of rockets”), even in poems that fade out, and most do not; they keep on shining, even as they might also convey information about events that extend beyond Rosal’s own life. That life, though, comes into sharp focus, too. He begins with a street fight, with vividly remembered basketball and a fabulous vision of boxing; he ends with love and music, “spinets, toys, consoles and uprights,” “all the clandestine joys in the wood of one piano,” bound for the one woman the poet loves. (Oct.)