The book unfolds in four sections. The first moves from the tranced stillness and silence evoked in “Mt. Pisgah,” “how dark/ Fell over the road that led into town and kept us/ All from moving” to the urgent yearning of “Self-Portrait, Leakesville,” where the young speaker hears in “the wind-combed drift/ Of dust in the field” his heart’s “pointing the direction away/ From that town, saying there I am, there I am, there I am. . .”

The second and most remarkable section of the book is a long poem in ten parts, each a different moment in his relationship with his father, mentally ill and alcoholic, in and out of hospitals, in and out of his son’s life. This is the poem that gives the book its title. This sequence is as rich as a novel in its evocation of his father’s life, the son’s attempt to make sense of his father’s madness, the ache of his father’s presence so threaded with absence, the baffled hunger for intimacy, his longing for his father to be able to be fully a father so he can be fully a son. All this stands in ironic and non-ironic counterpoint to the verse from John’s gospel that forms the poem’s epigraph: “For the Father loveth the Son, and showeth him all things that he himself doeth; and he will show him greater works than these, that ye may marvel.”

The third section continues the outward trajec-tory to Korea, another present and absent here, as “The Landing” makes plain: “again/ You are here, again you understand so little.” The fourth section of the book traces the speaker’s return to the United States and to Jackson, Mississippi, where the gains and losses of his earlier and later self are evoked together. In the closing poem of the book, “Empty House,” he touches peace in a moment of contemplative immediacy with the things of the world beyond the self-conscious self, beyond words:

Maybe it’s true that everything
Leads to this, a night in which silence displays its own

Hidden architecture, the hewn gables, the untranslatable
Syllable of moon in a tilt above the roof, only to show
How absent the self is. How picked of words. How near
at hand.

This marriage of awareness and the world can be read as a return after experience to the spelled “silence” that “grew tall” between the farm buildings of the opening poem; here silence is redeemed and redemptive, for it finally brings the speaker a moment of complete presence, presence unmixed with longing.

These poems are technically perfectly mature. Their multiple music arises from the brilliant counterpoint of syntax against stanza, the pacing of rhythms, the cadence of phrases, and all the resources of phonetic melody. Their images, whether in the service of direct description, metaphor, or expressive distortions of experience to represent the pressure of feeling, are exact and evocative, often original but, once read, inevitable. In both sound and image they are marked by a balanced gorgeousness.

More than once in reading these poems I was reminded of a story about the great Zen master, Fach’ang. As he lay dying a squirrel screeched on the roof. “It’s just this,” he said, “and nothing more.” These poems try to bring us as near as words can to the unrepeatable “just this” of each thing and event and to the silence which things ride and are.

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Millsaps Magazine  |  Millsaps | Last Edited August 12, 1999