While Major's Configurations: New & Selected Poems 1958–1998
was nominated for a National Book Award, this is his most subtle and beautiful book yet, highlighting his impressive range of styles and his precision of expression. Major explores his sense of place and its links to landscape, art, love and home in poems like "Purple California Mountains, near Half Moon Bay": "That's a boundary, too, and two, from a window in the house./ The darkness there is not yours, not mine./ Concrete in its promise, corrosive and full of dust, it./ We knew it the moment we entered, we knew./ It's not our darkness, it's rented." Divided into three parts, the collection begins with meditative poems that echo Gary Snyder in their close observation of the wild California landscape. Yet Major also uses precise Creeley-esque stanzas and notebook jottings to show humans overwhelmed by nature. From "Habitat: Time and Place, Cambria, California, 1999": "Today, hill pasture, full of flax's white,/ same as yesterday, gnarly and snippy./ I'm out here going to seed under the tree./ I'm suspicious of this open land laid out and out.// It's friendly but/unsympathetic—or maybe it's me, maybe it's just me./ I keep framing it anyway/ but it goes beyond frame/ while staying the same, immodest and lippy." Part II moves from California to poems on paintings and Paris; these poems gracefully and obliquely address both the acceptance and the dislocation an artist of color feels in the City of Light, with its history of harboring Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Countee Cullen and other émigrés from the United States. A wide-ranging third section moves from abstract poems like "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me" to poems-on-poetry, such as "What Is a Symbol?" to the lovely title poem of the book, which skillfully combines shades of Beckett's Waiting for Godot
with the subtle nostalgia of waiting to find place, a home, identity, or the mysterious and undefined Sweet Betty herself: "I wait for plum rock to turn a darker purple./I wait for the unmistakable black in white people to show./I wait for black people to catch windflowers./The sweetest waiting, though, is waiting for Sweet Betty." This collection has been well worth waiting for. (Nov.)
