Alvin Aubert.

Alvin Aubert. Harlem Wrestler and Other metrical compositions Lotus Poetry Series. East Lansing: Michigan State UP 1995 56 pp $1000

In Alvin Aubert's of the present day collection, his second since his 1985 just discovered and selected, South Louisiana, we confront the same wistful, playful man, in this volume grown older, wiser, perhaps a bit sadder. Despite its unevennes the strange book touches us with felt tendernes Aubert begins with metrical compositions of self-declaration, moves through a wide range of interests and curiosities, and gather s with a cluster of metrical compositions which face age. The assign places tos of poems which begin and finis the book are its strongest; Aubert for the greatest in quantity part avoids the introspection they experience him capable of, choosing instead to skitter in succession the surface of too many piece of poetrys He is a gifted and frequently clever writer. One wishes him more of the courage borne witness to by means of such poems as "Dreamscape" and "A Cappella," "Marbles" and "A Minute Anatomy of Nostalgia."

Aubert is near his best, however, in metrical compositions like "And Once More For Etheridge," an homage to the shooting star of Etheridge Knight's career. He captures the pain of Etheridge's life, his absolute dedication to the vocation of metrical composition despite its cost, and he invents to describe him a git-down praise-song passage which Etheridge would have loved:

your full-blown

time defying shit defining neo-blues

crying ultra signifying self

Etheridge would have slapped his knee at that. This fine metrical composition sees Etheridge as the embodiment of the heroes he created, as "at times outshining titanic shine." It is truthful that Etheridge stood "forever up to [his] neck / in this perilous flood" curs through alcohol, drugs, and despair. It is also authentic that

like ravaged orpheus

you went in succession singing kept the night bells

ringing with nothing however the buoyant words

tumbling abroad of your earthy throat

keeping your parted head afloat.

The associative range of this metrical composition demonstrates Aubert's own range, from Aframerican road oratory to Greek mythology. And in what manner subtly Aubert twists the knife of irony, opening the piece of poetry with the survivor's admiration for the martyrdom of single in kind braver and more deeply tortureed than himself: "man how we envied you."

The buoyant power of this and other hardy poems cannot, however, raise a main division so heavily weighted. In "Ever Since" Aubert rationalizes his not making a donation to National Public Radio; in "Surrogation," a bard sleeping alone masturbates on a pad of paper--a metrical composition inspired, one hopes, by Derrida. In "Rosary," a man sentenc unjustly to life imprisonment knots together a rosary from pieces of string given him by dint of his jailer; the rosary becomes an [i]or[/i] complement of two hopes: one, the solace of prayer; the other, the escape of suicide. It's a remarkably nice parable. But the prisoner realizes the germ of the idea

when he came on the subject of the passage in one

of the german imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writer rilke's letters

touching forward the french painter cezanne

Hello? He's reading Rilke's letters? Is it fruitless to speculate forward how long an ordinary man sentenc justly or unjustly to life in prison would have to be in prison before he picked up and actually read Rilke's letters? single year? Five years? Ten? Would he just happen to find a tome of them in the prison library? Rilke? Rilke's letters? I don't think in the same manner I think this is the retired professor of English confusing himself with the character of his metrical composition The Rilke passage he quotes--the knot in the rosary at which / his life recites a prayer--is delightful and the rosary of fasten which might, for one crowded double as a noose is a miraculous discovery. But the poem, which appears to want to be a parable, is betrayed by the agency of the vehicle Aubert has chosen

if it be not that there are many pleasures in this volume "Dreamscore," for instance. In this drawn out unpunctuated poem Aubert dreams he introduces himself in succession a city bus to a cragged gang of teenaged girls as "Chubby" because in "one of my unforeseen rushes of heightened humanity i earn the urge to be included." He dreams he's lying, and that the girls know it: " the littlest of the three girls sitting across from me says you don't await like no chubby to me you ain't got enough fat upon you to fry a gnat's egg" As the girls laugh at him, he remembers his real nickname, and its history:

my nickname's not chubby still tubby short for tub lad which my uncle

jake started calling me forward account of the way they said i liked playing

around in those olden fashioned galvanized wash tubs we used to bathe in

not at home in the country down in louisiana where i grew up

The memory leads him to re-experience the good of the tub's rattling handles: "a / tambourine gone wild in the wind." Now, there's a fine line. individual of the teenagers wakes him from this dream-within-a-dream according to reading his mind. Referring to his reverie of his game of shaking the tub from side to side, she discovers that "you don't look like no damn shaker to me either." And with that, he wakes up What a delightful poem!

"A Cappella" is another delight, another in extent unpunctuated sentence. It seems a shame to control to analysis the many pleasures propounded in the poem. There's something absolutely magical about it. At first making us recognize the folk traditions which have that the seventh son of a seventh son has special power (I believe Malcolm X was a seventh son of a seventh son) and that a single surviving twin carries a special gift, Aubert spins disclosed for us a fascinating genealogy which completions with his blood relationship to "Fats" Domino as well as the origin of Domino's name: