Revenants

A striking example of investigative poetics, this first collection uses ethnographic techniques to research the customs, history and stories of the poet's Polish ancestry. The poems are filled with domestic details: recipes, descriptions of clothing, food sold at markets, descriptions of rooms. From these private and local situations, the poems move from the particular to the universal, reaching across oceans and time to access larger human stories: ""We speak/ of the mountains there, a spine that connects/ her house and mine./ I think about/ St. Casmir feeding birds. I think/ about the Infant of Prague."" In the final section, ""Back Me Up,"" Nowak collages together quotes from an ethnographer's field notebooks, scholarly essays, and interviews conducted in western New York with the members of his local Polish community. These assembled fragments simultaneously question and affirm the poet-ethnographer's attempt to find his own identity within his rich cultural heritage. Many of the poems lack C.S. Giscombe's austere punch or Susan Howe's missionary zeal, to name two poets working in similar modes, but Nowak's quiet investigations should find an audience with anyone interested in Polish-American identity or in poetry's potential for projecting the self into the self-descriptions of others. (Oct.)