Wanda Coleman.

Wanda Coleman. Bathwater Wine. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow P 1998 288 pp $2750 cloth/$1500 paper.

"I have three wings," detects the persona of one of the poems in Coleman's new collection Bathwater Wine, barely to ask "with whom do i flock?" And perhaps this is a righteous way of phrasing the question of Coleman's location within contemporary American verse Coleman's sure grasp of an impressive range of poetic strategies, denominations and registers. combined with the sharpness and sensitivity of her vision, makes her something of an remaining bird on the American poetic landscape. Despite being formally complexus and experimental, her poetry is les interested in displaying its avant-garde credentials than in tracing the linguistic contours and grain of a realm of experience largely absent from "official" American public discourse. This combination of attentiveness, experimentalism, and passion, then, makes Coleman a singular figure--though not a solitary the same For what this volume also reminds us is that Coleman's rhyme does "flock," both in the understanding that it offers an expansive conception of poetic tradition, parti cularly in the fresh "American Sonnets," and in the fact that it remains centrally businessed with questions of affiliation, coexistence, and collectivity.

The range of tone in Bathwater Wine will be a surprise for those who are alone aware of Coleman's work by the and of anthologies which, perhaps understandably, attend to emphasize the tension and pace which her metrical composition can generate. In contrast, many of the metrical compositions in the first two parts of the work are concerned with memories of childhood and adolescence, and their tone is quieter and more intimate. In the first part, "Dreamwalk," fragmentary memories combine to give a glimpse of an adolescence where the mundane is charged with anticipation, an adolescence of "homework and that eternal ritual called / pressing-out-the-kinks, waiting for your breasts to / fill your bra." now anticipation, which may seem likewise intimate because it is to what extent we dream ourselves, is organized by dint of images and narratives which increase out of larger histories, as we are reminded by means of the ironies that course by the and of the most low key of details ("your favorite is / the wound where Danny Kaye sings about the grewsome duckling"). And, as throughout the convolution here we are not allowed to forget that anticipation betrays and disappoints, as well as working to sustain hope--for "only the popular girls win to Casablanca," and "only the / girls with amber views sit with the swells at Rick's." There is a kind of flickering between the detail of mundane chance of a favorable results and dreams and the motion of larger histories which charges these remembered fragments with irony. And as the last metrical composition of the sequence remarks, the abundant anticipated entry into adulthood for in the same manner many of the young men from this community will be the draft and Vietnam.

This intense concentration upon a specific instant, which flickers to reveal glimpses of another vista or topography of force, can be seen in different manifestations everywhere the volume. In the secondary part, "Disclosures," a child's memories of her father are threaded between the walls of reflections on collective history and contemporary living, in such a manner that the urgency and anger of experience are haunted, qualified, and enriched by means of a complex sense of remorse loss, and anticipation. In the "American Sonnets" perhaps the richest metrical compositions of the volume, Coleman's avow verse is revealed as haunted at other histories and traditions, which are themselves then reexamined and remembered. The last sum of two units sections work across a diffuse range of materials, a certain quantity of of which extend series already established through Coleman while others develop just discovered directions.

This feeling of a visible world haunted from glimpses of half-forgotten memories, of dreams and alternative coming eventss pervades the volume as a whole and is central to Coleman's poetic vision. And it is in these seasons that Coleman's work can be located in relation the two to wider currents in African American writing and to various experimental and radical poetries. The poetic experimentalism of Coleman's metrical composition is always motivated, and her refusal of the "straightforward" always carries a sharp point ("happy endings are the propagation and / perpetuation of The Lie. nappy endings are, of course les straight"). Far from a bloodles formalism, her metrical composition offers what might be described, in her have phrase, as a "passionate dada." yet equally, her work remains committed to tracing the impoverished experience of the current rather than seeking consolation in nostalgic, surrealistic, or otherworldly fantasies--"this is not Mars," explanations the persona in one metrical composition "it's outer D.C." And the metrical composition finds in the intimacies of daily life, in the easily consum junk of popular improvement in fragments of dream, in the recollection of poetic tradition, and in other unlikely places a particular kind of hope--that "life as we know it is coming to an end"

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