| "Each poem began with a collision," William Pitt Root warns, and goes on to declare himself against sin: "I believe a poem needs to be accessible to the reader as the experience behind it was to the writer and that exclusion in either case is a failure of the artist's imagination and his humanity." Fortunately the poet indulges sin enough to be interesting most of the time, and the good poems recover from the collision they began with, transform it into an encounter, even a tryst. The parties to this coming together, this form of making it which is a poem, are Root's obsessive and eschatological extremes: initiation and foreclosure, freedom and ordinance, growing and rotting, life and death. His great tropes are Light and Dark; the Sea and the Journey his great reservoirs of force. Not yet thirty, this poet is ambitious ("he attempts to balance / his body's exhaustion with the land's"), oratorical ("our sudden lives, shaped of flesh / conceived in loss, and riven by desire"), sullen ("we are tired too, and come here to forget / what time it is and where we are. The child / is our only innocence"), convincing. Because he is convinced, because he suffers the conviction that life -- his life, the planet's -- is dependant on death, rooted in death though pitted against it, the poet determines to impersonate an escaped con. His poems cast about for transcendence by emblem, for release by violent juxtaposition: "where fresh water and salt collide and mingle." As the titles indicate, "On the Tidal Ledge," "The Jellyfish" and "While the Ocean Turns" are assaying confrontations of the self and some dissolving Other. In such engagements the poet has an ear for new sounds -- "a distant mill's |
