Fifth Season: Poems.

Anthony Butts. Fifth Season: Poems. Chelsea, MI: New Issues P, 1997. 52 pp. $12.00.

Anthony Butts dedicates this first collection of poetry to "the imaginary gods," many of whom seem to live in this book as silent yet towering indications of the ways we construct lives within our lives. The poet meditates divinity within these poems as a condition of being caught between a material world that forsakes the individual and a spiritual world that beautifies even breath "on the loose clouds of winter blowing through rags / stuffed between a broken window and its screen." The first section, "Detroit, City of Straits," progresses through the airy, introductory poem of the same title, to the sturdy silent figures of "The Belle Isle Men," their voices murmuring "the revenge of lust exchanged like rage," to the quiet reminiscence of "The Nature of Braille," in which the speaker remembers "the prettiest girl in the fifth grade" and the "glossy gray veils obscuring her eyes." These opening poems are laden with the lugubrious voice of a boy cast as an Other among others-near-blind, black, and poor--as he savors "the joy / of the lonely: the inevitable call of the afterlife / within the shadows of childhood dreams."

The second section, "Writing the Body," revisits the classical element with "Nocturne," while also revisioning the sentimental implications of the title with "signs of violence" and the child's exercise of "forgetting the next smack" from a parent, or his own anger directed toward "Darrel Barnes, the bully of / Wilson Junior High." The poetic landscape is rich with "weeping willows like a child / hanging onto the hard end / of a broomstick" and "frantic ducks ... sucked at by pot-bellied carp." Butts deconstructs the idea of pastoral innocence so that the city and its sin flood the reader, as in "Small Atrocities" where, for "an orphaned child," the "night comes on like an apocalypse / of solace, the evident ease of shadows / taking him in like a relative, his eyes / edging away." The collection settles further into revisioning classical themes in the final section, "The Imaginary Gods," a series of poems recalling, sometimes more through title than progression, the Orphean myth. Here, as in Orpheus Descendin g," myth is located in "the crescent moon hanging low / over Lake Michigan; the upper section / of a fractured hourglass" as time "passes in increments / of wishes like the mysterious / bulbs projecting themselves / into the air."

The final poems of the book creep out of the quiet resolve in earlier poems, and are more daring in the forthright declarations of a speaker who seeks to "peel back the layers of God's skin." Butts brings us to his final meditation within the "Envoi," allowing the poem "Skin" to show us, for the first time, the persona motivating many of the poems throughout the book. The speaker refutes his own presence in "a world of desire. . . too strong" where "true memories are fires within" as a means to both take ownership of the verse and also to make a gift of it and of his quiet yet ardent voice, "a rapid angel since falling / to earth."