Smoke by Doriaane Laux BOA Editions, Ltd., 2000.

Who comes to tend the garden,
the green shoots flowering
into radiant stars, the damp mulch
fragrant–so soft you might think
a body had opened under your shoe.

In the poem "The Gardener," Laux gives us the straw hat, the root-clumped clod, the black leaf mold, the tomato vines strung like a harp, the blowsy cabbage, the heart-shaped spade. She gives us these images because they are right and true, and fall to her touch like a soft pear.

Like most contemporary poets, Laux is an uncompromising realist, treating her subjects to the honor of honest clarity, and not the charity of romance. These wonderful observations are matched in other places by frank, even gratuitous insights into the nature of the world. The title poem "Smoke" is about cigarette smoking. The final poem, "Life Is Beautiful," is about maggots. And flies. And the gorgeously abundant life cycle. Maybe you can’t have beauty without ugliness, or maybe ugliness is beauty. This effusive realism, with its cataloguing of details, can produce stunning victories, and less frequently, vainglorious defeats. "Take the fly, angel / of the ordinary house, laying its bright / eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out / delicately along a crust of buttered toast." This "fecund iridescence," this "bag of jewels" makes a stunningly and distastefully beautiful kind of abundance.

There are several truly wonderful poems in the collection (this being Laux’s third), and that is itself amazing and quite promising. When I first saw "The Shipfitter’s Wife" in the 2000 edition of Best American Poetry, I was instantly struck. I had every reason not to like it–Laux having kept my own poetry out of a very nice magazine she was guest-editing–but I did like it. In fact I loved it. Here is a love poem for today: writing from the body using realistic details and a resistance to idealization: his fingers still curled from fitting pipe, his denim shirt ringed with sweat, his cracked hands jammed between his thighs, his forehead anointed with grease–the resistance also to encapsulation: a sonnet plus five lines? no, a poem ending only when finished and not at the command of any artificial form–the sharpness of the images: the voice of the foreman clanging / off the hull’s silver ribs–the sometime sloppiness of the lines: I loved him most / when he came home from work"–and finally the Pinskyesque list: the clamp, the winch, the white fire of the torch, the whistle, etc.. Her best poems contain only those images which develop complexity and beauty. In a few other cases, the observations Laux makes seem slave to an unquenchable motion, as if every legitimate observation is deserving of space. Her Janis Joplin poem "Pearl" sounds straight out of the poetry slams:

                     So loud, so hard, so furious,
hurling heat-seeking balls of lightning
down the long human aisles, her voice crashing
into us–sonic booms to the heart–this little white girl
who showed us what it was like to die
for love, to jump right up and die for it night after
drumbeaten night, going down shrieking–hair
feathered, frayed, eyes glazed, addicted to the song–
a one-woman let me show you how it’s done, how it is,
where it goes when you can’t hold it anymore.
Child of everything gone wrong, gone bad, gone down,

and on and on. Apt for her subject, this breathless, bluesy scat, but farthest from that older kind of poetry where every word is the only word. Occasionally Laux presents what seems to me an unfortunate tendency to combine the flow of super-realistic details with her desire to see the world as it actually is, without modesty and absent the mist of romance. Thus we gorge ourselves on the brilliantly awful portrait of teenage girlhood in "Iceland," which is enough to take the blush off that rose forever–as if it’s not ink she’s using, but paint-stripper. As if underneath the makeup, girls are nothing but yellow blister skin, hair clots, ear crusts, and tampons. Why forget intestinal gas, and of course, undigested meat protein?

For too many poets today, there isn’t even a glimmer of lightning on the hot summer horizon. For Laux, the storm breaks out in full several times in Smoke. In the title poem, smoking becomes a kind of communion, a sweet mingling with the swirling ghost of death and darkness. "Fear" becomes a catalogue of girlhood and growing up at "the crumbling edge of the continent." It is a powerful torrent:

We were afraid of fingers of pickleweed crawling
over the embankment, the French Kiss, the profound
silence of dead fish, burning sand, rotting elastic
in the waistbands of our underpants, jellyfish, riptides [. . .]

One of my favorite poems is the love poem "Trying To Raise The Dead." Reminiscent, and this is a compliment, of Christina Rossetti’s Ghost poems, and Thomas Hardy’s Haunter poems of 1912-1913, it consists of a lover left behind and grasping, in vain, for one final word or touch. Unlike those poems, it is not the fulfillment of the romantic fantasy–that is, the dead are dead; they can’t speak, and only the living know full well that death is an end unbreachable.

Look at me. I’m standing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
people inside the house. It’s not my

house, you don’t know them.
They’re drinking and singing
and playing guitars. You love

this song. Remember? "Ophelia."
Boards on the windows, mail
by the door. I’m whispering

so they won’t think I’m crazy.
They don’t know me that well.
Where are you now? I feel stupid.

I’m talking to trees, to leaves
swarming on the black air, stars
blinking in and out of heart-

shaped windows, to the moon, half-
lit and barren, stuck like an axe
between the branches. [. . .]

This is what the best contemporary poetry is like: sharp images; casual lines; beautiful. It’s personal; it says what it has to say with a confident fullness. Walk through Laux’s garden. A body will open under your shoe.