by Kent Chadwick

Around the World in Eighty-Eight Pages

oet and University of Washington English professor Colleen J. McElroy is on the move, noting the signs of the times in her seventh collection of poems, Travelling Music. Premonitionally, she writes of the Balkans -- "heroes lounging in Slavic poses, cigarettes in place;" of "American / Bombs laid pillar to post;" of the sadness of Belgrade; and even of Tarzan, a year before the new animation feature was released, but with un-Disneyesque irony. McElroy's take on Tarzan is from the perspective of the descendants of monkeys that were used in the 1930s Tarzan films and then abandoned to the Florida wilderness:

... Tarzan and everything

is bared: teeth for a fight or penis erect to mate--

always it is Tarzan: his loin cloth slung

like a butcher's apron--Tarzan: with bananas and lollies

and how the world would be all right as long as he was

landlord--Tarzan: you old sound bite lost among alligators

and birds murmuring in the lugubrious shadows of gum trees--

Tarzan! Tarzan! Why hast thou forsaken us?

-- from "The End of Civilization as We Know It"

Travelling Music follows by a year McElroy's entertaining and detail-rich travel memoir, A long way from St. Louie (Coffee House Press, 1997). Read together, these two books are an excellent example of how a poet's experiences can serve as the ground upon which she shapes the relief of her poems. Begin with A long way from St. Louie and hear about McElroy's travels, travails, insights, and pursuit of kin -- as an African American, she's discovered that what her mother had told her was true, "Chile, they got some of us everywhere, wearing all manner of clothes and speaking in every kind of tongue." Learn some poignant history as she visits Majorca, how the Moors used the caves on that Mediterranean island as hiding and staging places for their invasions of Spain until "the "Spaniards poured hot tar into the caves' opening." Then turn to Travelling Music and see how she has worked those varied impressions into poems, like "Puerto Cristo," which opens with this striking image of those Majorca caves:

Some say

Angels sleep

In the Caves of Ham

Their crystallized wings

Touch floor to ceiling

Some of McElroy's poems are clearer, more in focus than others. Travelling Music gave me the sensation of sitting in front of a phoroptor, the device that an optometrist draws up to your eyes and uses to click refracting lens into place while asking "Is this clear? Or is this clearer?" Poems like "Lifting the Morning" or "Poem for Kitaro Written at a Nude Beach on the Adriatic" are sharp and help the reader see fine detail. Many others though are somehow fuzzy; their structure fails to draw their parts into focus.

"Free-Falling Nebraska" is one of McElroy's strong, clear poems. It opens with a great first line: "The mind's eye pins all we know to some horizon." What a sharp verb McElroy has found in "pins;" the unexpected metaphor of an eye pinning things creates an electrical excitement. The precision of her metaphor wins the reader into accepting McElroy's point that all our memories are bound to a place.

Traditional fiction writers work to win suspension of disbelief from readers. When this is won and given, the fiction can then draw the reader into the ideal dream state of narration. Poets work to reduce distraction, to win the audience's attention. When that attention is won and given, the poem can offer a new vision.

"Lifting the Morning" is a great poem. Its clarity carries you from the Italian island of Ischia off the Neapolitan coast, with its "Profusion of flower petals, bread, cheese / And the day's first rocksalt smell of the sea," back to the speaker's childhood and the crayons she used both to color paper dolls and "To trace map lines where newsreels said Patton / Had taken his tanks and my father south // To the war in Africa," and returns you to breakfast on the balcony of a pastel house "shored by a bedrock" of "sleeping American bombs" left over from her father's war. This poem is a tour de force of image and memory, love and loss.

"A Little Travelling Music," the collection's title poem, is one of the less successful, fuzzier poems. It begins:

This is not a planet I would want to inherit--

With its inventory of mountainous sorrows

There is hardly a place to lay a good night's

Sleep before tomorrow's bad news arrives,

The lines are wordy. The qualifications confuse the point. Why not simplify and say, "This is no planet to inherit?" The two metaphors for sorrows -- an inventory and a mountain chain -- weaken each other. It's unnecessary to add that news "arrives." The end effect is a fuzzy poem fails to break through our habitual distraction.

At her best, McElroy uses spirited line breaks that build momentum and draw you into the scene, the dance, the feeling. She can also slow down the boogie, take a meditative turn, and spiral you through thoughts on language and life. Great onomatopoeia are sprinkled throughout the book, such as "the snick-snick of snipers," and "bridge railings slicing shadows / across the water whuckity-whuck like Chuck Berry's guitar." When sharp, her poems can carry you around the world.

Look for McElroy' next book, the non-fiction Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar, later this year from the University of Washington Press.