Dancing on Main Street.

Dancing on Main Street by Lorenzo Thomas Coffee House Press, April 2004 $15.00, ISBN 1-566-89156-6

Lorenzo Thomas is a master of language and craft and his long awaited new collection showcases his agility--from rangy surrealism to the sparest blues to elegies of Vietnam that could only come from lived experience. But this is not empty virtuosity. Something deeply personal and deeply felt lives within these poems; they are well seasoned.

Even at his most abstract and esoteric, one senses that the author's care, not only for the placement of words on the page, but also for their intended emotional impact. And while there are wonderful lines and narrative twists and inventive phrases, each poem contains its oval winning logic, which makes excerpting just one or two lines difficult.

Thomas writes about any and everything: the death of Amadou Diallo, The Price Is Right game show, gel-rich-quick schemes, married love. But the book's five sections do contain loose threads: movement and travel, musicality, surrealism, black masculinity, the interior life. Thomas writes of blackness and with blackness, but it does not circumscribe him. "What does the warmth / Of your hand mean," he writes in "Lustre," a poem from the final section. "... Your hand your heart / The hot comb in the radio / That pulled Glenn Miller's Orchestra / Out of the sky."

How strange and lovely to mix big band and hot combs and so much tenderness. Such is Thomas's gift, one well used.

Reviewed by Holly Bass Holly Bass is a writer and performer. Her book reviews have appeared in The Washington Post Book World, The Philadelphia Inquirer and tema celeste international.