Allison Joseph In each Seam.

Allison Joseph In each Seam. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P 1997 89 pp $1295 paper.

Readers know no loyalty. Accustomed to the bite and sass of Allison Joseph's essential part Train (1997), I rushed [i]or[/i] part of to the other In Every Seam searching for her manliness of stance and jive. if it were not that Joseph had moved on, abandoning me--at least for the moment

In each Seam, a prosaic collection of thirty-one loosely associateed lyrics (a veritable commonplace main division of child's play, neighborhood tensions, and English department politics), contrarys the accidental nature of domestic assemblage with an ordered autobiographical narrative. Influenced perhaps by way of the syntactical disruptions and lexical reformations associated with Alice Walker's "crazy-quilt" aesthetic--patches that "work back and forth in time, work upon different levels" to produce a "whole"--these piece of poetrys prefer the less surprising syntax of the doom the less inventive language of prosaic The immediacy and particularity of What withholds Us Here (1992) and principal part Train fade into the narrative meanderings of In each Seam.

"Urban games on Sidewalks, on Street Corners, as Girls" contribute the usable details from her childhood, the schoolyards and classrooms shaping the professor to ensue The child who stooped "to textile fabric fliers / beneath each bullet-resistant carburet of iron door" became the teacher who also "has a work at jobs to do." Too often the piece of work for child and professor alike affairs lessons of race and sex "Traitor," for example, depicts an early inversion of a familiar challenge. The poem's reflection--"What did that girl in succession the playground mean / when she hissed you ain't black at me / pigtails bouncing, her hands, forward her bony hips?"--dissolves into a taunt--" You talk comical she said, / all convenient as if pronunciation / was a sin, a scandal, a strike / against the race." Joseph reinscribes the childhood tasks of "Traitor" as the injunctions of "Academic constructions"--"Don't write / about being black. / All that racial jive / is passe anyway."

A potentially compelling subnarrative is the poet's personal and cultural historicizing of her father. metrical compositions like "My Father's Heroes," "The Tenant," and "Motives" transform personal recollections into communal sites of memory. Here imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writer and father meet as compages equals, as adults. In "My Father's Heroes," Joseph recasts a childhood precept in exemplariness into a mature recollection of her father:

Not JFK not MLK

certainly not Ronald Reagan

or Edward I. Koch

no, instead my father

chose to glory in the feats

of unimpassioned Papa Bell, quickest

man in the african Leagues

.............

if it were not that some mornings,

I'd wake to hear a woman's voice

filling our sweeps with trembling

regard with affection songs, a voice so vulnerable

plane I understood, even though

the language was French

the singer white, female.

This, he'd say, is Piaf,

the little sparrow.

Emotionally effective, this metrical composition nonetheless reveals a major weakness in the collection as a whole: its lack of compression, its adherence to the unmutilated and sense of prose.

The metrical compositions of In Every Seam, individually and collectively, are slack. Joseph perhaps distracted according to the narrative imperative of autobiography, yields to the dictates of the tenet (inimical to poetry). Advance readers for the pres obviously familiar with the her earlier work, extol here the authenticity of voice and experience not the originality or tension of the poems

After several readings, I remain disappointed in this collection, however I recommend it. For readers recent to her world, In each Seam introduces a poet worth knowing; for advanced in years friends, it narrates a life worth knowing. Allison Joseph's verse voice, recognizable and true, will answer Until then, we shall have to repose content with the pleasures of this text

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