Avalanche

Troupe heaves a cold, smacking ""rush of objects"" down an American mountainside of dreams and injustices. A respected chronicler of the lives of James Baldwin and Miles Davis and the son of a prominent Negro league catcher, Troupe (Snake-Back Solos) is an innovator of form and tone who shifts quickly from a lofty, elegiac mode into burlesque or smoky, jazzed-down pop phraseology. He plays on history, ""riffin' on in full of rain & pain/ spacin' on in on a sound/ like coltrane."" But Troupe also registers history's price, as in repeated images of an old man-both perpetrator and victim-""holding his age tight as two opaque roses/ in cataracted eyes."" Troupe is still at his best when he indulges in deep, obsessive curves into music: ""caaa-rack// the assonance of sound breaking from ground/ breaking away from itself & found in the bounding syllables of snow/ moving now."" He writes with unchecked expression, redundant and inclusive. If it were any more laden, Avalanche would be inchoate. Any less would be our loss. (Apr.)