American Sublime.

American Sublime by Elizabeth Alexander Graywolf Press, October 2005 $14, ISBN 1-555-97432-5

The title of Elizabeth Alexander's fourth book of poetry is as much a description of the book's intentions as it is of the quality of the work.

In three sections, Alexander constructs a literary record of experience that is increasingly taken for granted into our cultural imagination. In each one, she reifies and reclaims values and voices in danger of atrophy from historical attrition and reorients the American aesthetic in such a way that is inclusive of black cultural experience.

In American Sublime, legacy is symbolized by the cultural memory of slavery, jazz, African folklore, a corrective historical subjectivity and a black pantheon of icons of achievement. Alexander seems to ask, to what use do we put our legacy of pride and strength today when the counter pressures of hostility turn to malignant ambivalence? The project hints at censure of a popular culture in danger of falling into forgetfulness.

The middle section of the book is a series of ars poeticas numbered out of series to suggest degree more than sequence. We should not assume that because there is an "Ars Poetica # 1,002," there must be at least 1,001 existing elsewhere (though there very well may be). Rather, numbering here builds the sense of compulsion attending the poems' composition. Though most of these poems do not readily pronounce themselves as commentaries on the art of poetry making, they are enlarged by the added context. Following the famous edict of Archibald MacLeish that "A poem should not mean / But be," Alexander understands that great poetry can't help but comment on the nature of the creative enterprise itself.

"Poetry," she writes: "is the human voice, / and are we not of interest to each other?" This interest stems from a desire to see ourselves offset in the poetry we are drawn to. In this, Alexander's portrayal of sublimity is a wealth of generosity and tempered zeal.

American Sublime concludes with poems re-imagining the lives and events surrounding the kidnapping and historic repatriation of Africans on the slave schooner Amistad. Here again, Alexander places her work in the tradition epitomized by Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage." The difference, however, is that Alexander's history of the Amistad is updated and imagined through a blues inflected lens. In "Cinque Redux," the hero foresees being "misremembered/ ... as upstart, rebel, rabble-rouser, leader." She writes: "Violent acts will be committed in my name." In his voice, Alexander critiques a future that is seen, in spite of the sacrifices made by this leader of the slave ship revolt and his countrymen, as "unfurling like the strangest dream." We are that future. What have we done with that dream?

Reviewed by Gregory Pardlo Gregory Pardlo is a poet and teaches at Medgar Evers College, in Brooklyn.