In Every Seam.

Allison Joseph. In Every Seam. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. 89 pp. $12.95 paper.

Readers know no loyalty. Accustomed to the bite and sass of Allison Joseph's Soul Train (1997), I rushed through In Every Seam searching for her energy of stance and jive. But Joseph had moved on, abandoning me--at least for the moment.

In Every Seam, a prosaic collection of thirty-one loosely connected lyrics (a veritable commonplace book of child's play, neighborhood tensions, and English department politics), counters the accidental nature of domestic assemblage with an ordered autobiographical narrative. Influenced perhaps by the syntactical disruptions and lexical reformations associated with Alice Walker's "crazy-quilt" aesthetic--patches that "work back and forth in time, work on different levels" to produce a "whole"--these poems prefer the less surprising syntax of the sentence, the less inventive language of prose. The immediacy and particularity of What Keeps Us Here (1992) and Soul Train fade into the narrative meanderings of In Every Seam.

"Urban games ... on Sidewalks, on Street Corners, as Girls" contribute the usable details from her childhood, the schoolyards and classrooms shaping the professor to come. The child who stooped "to stuff fliers / beneath each bullet-resistant steel door" became the teacher who also "has a job to do." Too often the job for child and professor alike concerns lessons of race and gender. "Traitor," for example, depicts an early inversion of a familiar challenge. The poem's reflection--"What did that girl on the playground mean / when she hissed you ain't black at me, / pigtails bouncing, her hands, on her bony hips?"--dissolves into a taunt--" You talk funny, she said, / all proper, as if pronunciation / was a sin, a scandal, a strike / against the race." Joseph reinscribes the childhood lessons of "Traitor" as the injunctions of "Academic constructions"--"Don't write / about being black. / All that racial jive / is passe anyway."

A potentially compelling subnarrative is the poet's personal and cultural historicizing of her father. Poems like "My Father's Heroes," "The Tenant," and "Motives" transform personal recollections into communal sites of memory. Here poet and father meet as complex equals, as adults. In "My Father's Heroes," Joseph recasts a childhood lesson in exemplariness into a mature recollection of her father:

Not JFK, not MLK,

certainly not Ronald Reagan

or Edward I. Koch,

no, instead my father

chose to glory in the feats

of Cool Papa Bell, quickest

man in the Negro Leagues

.............

But some mornings,

I'd wake to hear a woman's voice

filling our rooms with trembling

love songs, a voice so vulnerable

even I understood, even though

the language was French,

the singer white, female.

This, he'd say, is Piaf,

the little sparrow.

Emotionally effective, this poem nonetheless reveals a major weakness in the collection as a whole: its lack of compression, its adherence to the sound and sense of prose.

The poems of In Every Seam, individually and collectively, are slack. Joseph, perhaps distracted by the narrative imperative of autobiography, succumbs to the dictates of the sentence (inimical to poetry). Advance readers for the press, obviously familiar with the her earlier work, extol here the authenticity of voice and experience not the originality or tension of the poems.

After several readings, I remain disappointed in this collection, though I recommend it. For readers new to her world, In Every Seam introduces a poet worth knowing; for old friends, it narrates a life worth knowing. Allison Joseph's poetry voice, recognizable and true, will return. Until then, we shall have to rest content with the pleasures of this text.