Muscular Music.

Terrance Hayes. Muscular Music. Chicago: Tia Chucha P, 1999. 80 pp. $10.95.

Terrance Hayes's first book of poetry is a typical, if not all-too-typical, collection of well-written mainstream poems, covering subjects as diverse and unsurprising as popular culture icons, the pangs of desire and hesitation, jazz giants, and youth crime. This is all presented in straightforward, semi-confessional lyrics and narratives that explicitly pay homage to poets as different in sensibility as Michael Harper, Paul Beatty, Quincy Troupe, and Frank O'Hara. As such, the collection seems to be less the heralding of a new "voice" or sensibility than a kind of summing up of past and current trends.

At his best, as in poems like "Buy One, Get One," "Ballad of Bullethead," "Goliath Poem," and "Late," Hayes achieves a modest lyric intensity that, shorn of the attitudinizing and affectations of so many of these poems, seems genuinely hard won. The pathos of the supermarket ad competes with asides on mathematics, politics, slavery, and poetry in the MTV/BET-esque collage of images and references comprising "Buy One, Get One":

In the 10th grade I knew briefly numbers to be the Grand

Daddies of the Cosmos. Pythagoras & Plato, knew it too--

MATH: realm of the Real & Infinite Truth. Each old man

was right to scorn poets for their noise about Death

& personal Beauty. Anyone will tell you, Poetry

is beautiful, but it ain't no super Model.

And in "Ballad of Bullethead" Hayes manages to capture the dazzling wordplay of the best rap lyrics even if the poem itself, as an overture to "The Yummy Suite," a series of poems based on a Chicago murder, plays perhaps into the stereotypical linkage of rap, drugs, and crime:

Words sounding absurd

But I gotta get heard

On corner On curb Car garage Back yard

--Lyric fusillade

Sentence propensity This word--

World intensity Past

Tense Ten pence

Whatever makes cents

Wit like this is, unfortunately, rare in the volume as a whole. The Frank O'Hara imitations/homages ("Morning Poem" and "Derrick Poem [The Lost World]") only emphasize by contrast the superiority of the New York poet, and the obligatory paeans to Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane (along with nods to Roberta Flack, Marvin Gaye, and Donny Hathaway) are largely flaccid and uninspired. However, the two best poems in the book, "Goliath Poem" and "Late," suggest that Hayes has the talent to write intense lyrical meditations that swerve elegantly between pop culture references and stark, often violent, crises in the lives of those we nonetheless love. Thus "Goliath Poem" offers sympathy for all the "big men" of the world who, like the nemesis of Faye Wray, or the Biblical Esau, cheated out of an inheritance, provoke, and are themselves provoked, to violence. The last stanza of the poem is an epiphany, worth quoting in its entirety:

... I could have talked

about the horse on its carousel; how each man lowers

his head to circle, blindly, his life. But we said nothing.

We listened to rain like the sound of a big man's tears,

the sound God made before the Word or Light,

And the moon curved above us like an ear.

Would that moments like these were more frequent in this book of poems. Terrance Hayes is an interesting poet, one worth watching, but on the basis of this collection, not yet noteworthy.