School of Udhra.

School of Udhra is Nathaniel Mackey's second full-length book of poetry, and represents a fitting continuation of his provocative and exciting poetic-cultural project, an ongoing fusion of the harmonic and melodic techniques of the most advanced post-bop jazz, the most reconditely avant-garde of twentieth-century poetics (both African American and white), the cultural traces of the African diaspora in its most wide-ranging appearances, and the multifarious apparitions of humanity's encounters with the ecstatic or spiritual, from Haitian voudoun to Siberian shamanism. The book's title alludes to an Arabic poetic tradition associated with the seventh-century Yemenite Bedouin Djamil; such an allusion is not inapt, for the salient characteristic of Udhrite poetics is an erotic abandon, an attraction to the beloved - in some ways analogous to the medieval "courtly love" tradition - so intense that it results in the poet's death, the literal dispersal of the poetic identity into the concentrated ardor of the verse: "Spent / wish. An extravagant throb lately / fallen from the sky, rapt Udhrite / espousal ... / Ache of its they the inundated earth / we lament" (46). And while sexual fulfillment figures in these poems, more often there is the complex fact of an unfulfilled, perhaps unfulfillable, longing: "Sat up sleepless in the Long Night Lounge, love / stood me up. Stayed away though its / doing so stirred me. Wine on my shirtsleeve, / wind on my neck" (13).

That wind is no doubt the "bedouin wind" to which the subtitle of one poem alludes, for the other keynote of these poems, besides that of longing, is of migration, a "bedouin wish / to be elsewhere, / every- / where at once." This movement is away from origins which, even as they recede, become mythicized, at once familiar and alien, the "mu" Mackey celebrates in an ongoing serial poem of that title - "Irredentist / myth, 'mu' meaning lost ground, / 'else' / the earlier where we were / after" (81) - and toward some ultimate personal or cultural goal, whether the beloved (who appears once memorably as "maitresse erzulie," the voudoun loa) or the Utopian (meaning, of course, "no-place") city of Zar, which, as Mackey quotes Larry Neal, "is just this side of far" (55).

These poems are not uniformly easy of access: They studiously avoid a consistent authorial or lyric voice, steering instead among a myriad of fragmented and disjointed voices and textual styles. Such disjunction, while rare in the works of contemporary African American poets - or at least those most often anthologized and lionized by the literary establishment - seems on one level to enact quite seriously the "death of the author" theorized by European poststructuralism. Happily, Mackey is a critic, explicator, and theorist of experimental texts, as well as an innovator in his own right. The publication of his volume of critical essays Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing has very nearly coincided with that of School of Udhra, and there are a number of moments in these essays that not only provide us signposts for approaching Mackey's own poetry but help us to situate his poetry within the spectrum of contemporary African American writing practices. One is a quotation from the "Language" poet Ron Silliman, who addresses the question of why so much poetry written by African American (and by "woman, ... sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the 'marginal'") appears "conventional" in comparison to his own experimentation and the experiments of his white colleagues. Since the "narrative of history has led not to their self-realization, but to their exclusion and domination," Silliman writes, such writers "have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to whom [sic] is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience." Mackey replies straightforwardly, if not scornfully: For Silliman to characterize African American literary production as "conventional" provides an index, not of that writing, but of Silliman's own limited experience thereof. To fail or refuse to "acknowledge complexity among writers from socially marginalized groups," Mackey writes, is nothing but condescension: "Experimental writing, the aesthetic margin, is not the domain solely of those from socially unmarginalized groups."

And Mackey's own writing is surely one of the best cases in point. Professor of Literature at UC-Santa Cruz and editor of the stunningly eclectic journal Hambone, Mackey is also among the foremost of a group of innovative African American poets among whom one can number Clarence Major, Erica Hunt, C. S. Giscombe, and Harryette Mullen. Mackey's poems are influenced by the early avant-garde poetics of Amiri Baraka, by the cross-culturality and pan-Africanism of Henry Dumas, and by such white experimentalists as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, leading lights of the "Black Mountain" school of poetry. Such a literary lineage is almost unique, though Mackey has much in common with the young Baraka, whose own work was modeled as much on the "new thing" of post-bop jazz as it was on the work of the avant-garde New York poets with whom then-LeRoi Jones associated in the Fifties and early Sixties, before his conversion to a militant Black Nationalism led him to a more easily accessible, hortatory poetics.

Mackey addresses this very shift in his essay "The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka," in which he valorizes the "obliquity or angularity" of Baraka's early work, qualities that are everywhere evident in the poems of School of Udhra. These poems, that is, do not tell singular, coherent stories, or even proceed out of clear, separably singular voices. They are complex and initially bewildering works, for they proceed on an assumed cultural and personal basis of complex contemporaneity and heterogenous, perhaps indeterminate origins. There is a dense web of intertextual references running throughout the poems, references to other texts, musical compositions, cultural traditions, and to Mackey's own previous writings. Such intertextuality is reinforced by the presence within School of Udhra of poems from Mackey's two ongoing series, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "mu." In many ways similar in structure to Robert Duncan's series Passages and Structure of Rime, each of which included poems from several of Duncan's books of poetry, Mackey's series are both continued from his earlier collection, Eroding Witness (1985). Their titles evince the cross-cultural range of his poetics: "Song of the Andoumboulou" derives from the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule's research among the Dogon peoples of Mali, and while "mu" takes its name from jazz trumpeter Don Cherry's album titles, it derives additional resonance from Jane Harrison's Themis: "A myth is not merely a word spoken; it is a re-utterance or pre-utterance, it is a focus of emotion Possibly the first muthos was simply the interjectional utterance mu" (21).

As I have noted, Mackey's first volume of poetry was titled Eroding Witness, and the figure of erosion remains a fitting description of the mode of these works: Syntax shifts and erodes under the reading eye, reference erodes, and ultimately the fundamental fictions of our reading poetry - the singular poetic voice and the direct address - erode and disappear. "Song of the Andoumboulou: 9" begins,

Took the dust of an eroded footprint, rolled as if thru dirt I'd see the coming forth of suns. Sowed ruins of what by then would whose walls collapse and crumble, dervished air so thin one's heartbeats hum ...(4)

In such a milieu of erosion and disappearance, the poem strives not so much to reconstitute or reconstruct a former - remembered or mythic - social/spiritual reality as it does simply to evoke, to gesture toward the site of that loss. Mackey's ongoing epistolatory fiction (the second volume of which has been published recently as Djbot Baghostus's Run) is titled From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. This image aptly captures the manner in which Mackey's writing continually plays upon the theme of loss and dislocation, a social or spiritual "phantom limb" (a metaphor Mackey borrows from the Guyanan novelist Wilson Harris):

Close by but so remote drawn off to this or that ungraspable "it."

Spoke of loss, relatedness, lack, religibility ... Never another time like the first but to be free of its memory. (23)

This particular poem - "Melin (- "mu" fourth part -)" - like all of Mackey's poetry, has precisely what Mackey praises in Baraka's work: "a mercurial, evanescent quality, as though it s[eeks] to assassinate any expectations of traceable argument or logical flow ... [such poems] seek to circumvent stasis, to be true to their mobility of thought, perception, and the play of unconscious forces." Such evanescence, however, does not mean that the poems have no clear referents or subjects. "Sweet Mystic Beast," for instance, is the most spiritually accurate lyrical evocation I know of the post-bop jazz saxophone: "Hunk of metal / strapped around / the neck. Not / a horn if not / bellowing ... beast / caught in the bell of a / horn" (35-37). And "Amma Seru's Hammer's Heated Fall" celebrates the work of Ed Love, a sculptor who creates frighteningly animated Afrocentric figures out of discarded car parts: "Brash alchemical / armor, philosophic polish, / lapis-lite chrome. / I sing of shine, the machine wrecked, / resurrected, banged-out / Osirian story told in chrome" (38).

In the middle poems of School of Udhra, Mackey cuts loose with what he calls his "vatic scat," arranging and rearranging the letters of the most common of demonstrative pronouns, "that," so that it becomes a Coltrane-like "sheet of sound": "Anagrammatic scramble. Scourge / of sound. Under its brunt / plugged ears unload ... Anagrammatic tath. Anagrammatic / that ... Palimpsestic / stagger, / anagrammatic / scat? (4344). This common word, meaningless outside of a specific context, is transformed by such "anagrammatic scramble" into a figure of mythic proportions, a signifier simultaneously of hoped-for community and artistic isolation: "To've been there as they / began to gather. All the tribes of Outlandish crowding the outskirts / of Ttha" (45), and "Awoke stranded on the island of / Ahtt, light's last resort" (48). Such moments of "gathering," of the tribes' return to origins, Mackey implies, can be found only within the interstices of language itself. Like few poets writing today, Mackey both dwells within language, in all of its cultural, historical, and aural resonances, and is simultaneously aware - not without discomfort - of the human being's alienness to language, our irrevocable and irremediable diaspora or exile from some cultural origin, or some Adamic state of coincidence with the world to which our words correspond. This particular doubleness of linguistic stance, along with his almost intimidating verbal gifts, makes Nathaniel Mackey one of the most compelling - as well as one of the most innovative - poets of his generation, and makes School of Udhra required reading for anyone interested in contemporary American poetry.

Reviewed by Mark Scroggins Florida Atlantic University