Blues Narratives.

Blues Narratives by Sterling Plumpp Tia Chucha Press, April 1999, $10.95, ISBN 1-882-68820-1

Carl Sandburg Award-winning poet Sterling Plumpp hollers blues onto each page of text, fashioning work songs from the mouths of kin to eulogize ancestors into a final living space in the reader's imagination.

Between the covers of Plumpp's book, mother and maternal grandfather are crooned into-and-out of death. By reconstructing their memories and weaving them into two narrative poems, he brings us their wit and grit, their individual biographies that mirror the hard-earned lessons of blues blackness in America.

The first poem, "Mary (1920-1980): Dialogue With My Mother," explores the essence of toil, poverty and strength in his mother's life. Here Plumpp seeks to acknowledge the gutting majesty of her sacrifice, and sets the body of her memory down in a thicket of blues refrains that pillow her agonies in a bed of musical riffs.

His next poem, "Victor (1850-1955)," pays deft homage to his grandfather. Plumpp conjures shotguns, rural Mississippi, snuff and gospel to unveil a haunting picture of the man that instructed him throughout his early adulthood.

One might study the genius of Plumpp's line breaks to gain insight to the tight construction of meaning in his poems. One might sing any of his magical verses aloud to discover how the author is pushing the blues to a new, broader territory of complexity and meaning. But John Edgar Wideman sums up what may be Plumpp's broadest appeal when he declares in the afterword: " ... his poems make me want to write."

Tyehimba Jess' poetry has been published in Obsidian III and The Book of Voices (www.e-poets.net).