Bathwater Wine.

Wanda Coleman. Bathwater Wine. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow P, 1998. 288 pp. $27.50 cloth/$15.00 paper.

"I have three wings," observes the persona of one of the sonnets in Coleman's new collection Bathwater Wine, only to ask "with whom do i flock?" And perhaps this is a good way of phrasing the question of Coleman's location within contemporary American poetry. Coleman's sure grasp of an impressive range of poetic strategies, styles, and registers. combined with the sharpness and sensitivity of her vision, makes her something of an odd bird on the American poetic landscape. Despite being formally complex and experimental, her poetry is less interested in displaying its avant-garde credentials than in tracing the linguistic contours and texture of a realm of experience largely absent from "official" American public discourse. This combination of attentiveness, experimentalism, and passion, then, makes Coleman a singular figure--though not a solitary one. For what this volume also reminds us is that Coleman's poetry does "flock," both in the sense that it offers an expansive conception of poetic tradition, parti cularly in the new "American Sonnets," and in the fact that it remains centrally concerned with questions of affiliation, coexistence, and collectivity.

The range of tone in Bathwater Wine will be a surprise for those who are only aware of Coleman's work through anthologies which, perhaps understandably, tend to emphasize the tension and pace which her verse can generate. In contrast, many of the poems in the first two parts of the book are concerned with memories of childhood and adolescence, and their tone is quieter and more intimate. In the first part, "Dreamwalk," fragmentary memories combine to give a glimpse of an adolescence where the mundane is charged with anticipation, an adolescence of "homework and that eternal ritual called / pressing-out-the-kinks, waiting for your breasts to / fill your bra." Yet anticipation, which may seem so intimate because it is how we dream ourselves, is organized by images and narratives which grow out of larger histories, as we are reminded by the ironies that course through the most low key of details ("your favorite is / the cut where Danny Kaye sings about the ugly duckling"). And, as throughout the volume, here we are not allowed to forget that anticipation betrays and disappoints, as well as working to sustain hope--for "only the popular girls get to Casablanca," and "only the / girls with amber eyes sit with the swells at Rick's." There is a kind of flickering between the detail of mundane hopes and dreams and the movement of larger histories which charges these remembered fragments with irony. And as the last poem of the sequence remarks, the much anticipated entry into adulthood for so many of the young men from this community will be the draft and Vietnam.

This intense concentration on a specific instant, which flickers to reveal glimpses of another vista or topography of force, can be seen in different manifestations throughout the volume. In the second part, "Disclosures," a child's memories of her father are threaded through reflections on collective history and contemporary living, so that the urgency and anger of experience are haunted, qualified, and enriched by a complex sense of regret, loss, and anticipation. In the "American Sonnets," perhaps the richest poems of the volume, Coleman's own verse is revealed as haunted by other histories and traditions, which are themselves then reexamined and remembered. The last two sections work across a diffuse range of materials, some of which extend series already established by Coleman while others develop new directions.

This sense of a visible world haunted by glimpses of half-forgotten memories, of dreams and alternative futures, pervades the volume as a whole and is central to Coleman's poetic vision. And it is in these terms that Coleman's work can be located in relation both to wider currents in African American writing and to various experimental and radical poetries. The poetic experimentalism of Coleman's verse is always motivated, and her refusal of the "straightforward" always carries a sharp point ("happy endings are the propagation and / perpetuation of The Lie. nappy endings are, of course less straight"). Far from a bloodless formalism, her poetry offers what might be described, in her own phrase, as a "passionate dada." But, equally, her work remains committed to tracing the impoverished experience of the present rather than seeking consolation in nostalgic, surrealistic, or otherworldly fantasies--"this is not Mars," comments the persona in one poem, "it's outer D.C." And the poetry finds in the intimacies of daily life, in the easily consumed junk of popular culture, in fragments of dream, in the recollection of poetic tradition, and in other unlikely places a particular kind of hope--that "life as we know it is coming to an end."