Sorrow's End.

Reviewed by Fahamisha Patricia Brown Trinity College (Hartford, CT)

I will court you in the melody of my passion

I will sruggle to win you with my song

These stanzas, which end Hilda Vest's poem "Lyrics I," are from her second collection of poems, Sorrow's End, and evoke the spirit of this slim volume. Vest's poems are snatches of songs we hear in passing that linger and emerge from time to time during the day, fragments of half-remembered melodies that tease our consciousness. Hilda Vest is a lyric poet, and the short poems which comprise this collection are songs worth singing, hearing, and reading.

The volume is divided into five sections which range from the very public to the more introspective, opening with a celebratory song on the occasion of Nelson Mandela's visit to Detroit, "Mandela Comes to Motown": "We had stopped singing," Vest writes, "until you came / and we saw that you still dance." In poems such as this that look outward, Vest is pointed, ironic, sometimes colloquial, always brief. Each poem in the section titled "Until You Came" leaves her reader with a vivid impression, a captured moment, an ironic observation. Vest's language most often is concrete - at its best, both melodic and painterly - word pictures in song. Occasionally, she reaches for the easy phrase or image, as in "Luqman" - "There will be talk / Luqman / talk among young men / that you respect women / and face east when you pray" - or her precious "Title for Doctoral Dissertation," with its anti-climactic ending. However, on the whole, the opening poems introduce a penetrating voice.

The poems of "Spring's Gambit" are meditations on seasons of the heart and soul as well as of nature. Physical landscapes and other images taken from nature provide an occasion for meditation. In "Another Colored Girl" the poems range from the private and personal of "Twenty-Fifth Wedding Anniversary" and "Personally," the section's opening and closing poems, to meditations on "Billie's Demise," an almost obligatory homage to Billie Holiday, and "Neecie Was Ten," a poignant reflection on the murder of a child. The poems of "Where Freedom Hides," which takes its name from the section's first poem, "Chant on US-80," return the reader to the more outwardly directed public sphere. The repetitions of this poem, dedicated to Tony Liuzzo, son of Civil Rights martyr Viola Liuzzo, evoke the call and response of the freedom songs sung at the time of Liuzzo's assassination. This section also evokes the confusion of public controversies, such as the war in Vietnam in "Confessions of a Black Soldier" or a teachers' strike in "Crossfire." The final section of the book, "On Turning Fifty," offers a mixture of song medley and photograph album. "Australia in 6 Takes" stands out here, as does the poem "Photograph."

In the collection's final poem, "Excuses Excuses Excuses," Vest confesses that "the metronome fascinates me / not for time / but for the way it moves." Music (rhythm and sound) and images (figures and pictures) are the stuff of poetry, and Hilda Vest's poems at their best marry sound and sense. Her various vernacular poems are not always successful; at times her phonetic spellings elude the actual sounds of spoken language and seem to obscure a poem's music. However, in "Internment" and "On Turning Fifty," the words sing. Her only typographic experiment, "Toast to Art and June," is less impressive: The spatial arrangement of the sixteen words of this poem promises much but delivers very little.

On the whole, though, this is a delightful collection. Phrases and images linger. In the book's forward, Willie Williams writes, "Poetry is a good vehicle to document and illustrate our journey." I would add that work and travel are enhanced and made easier with song. Hilda Vest has given us some songs for our journey. It is good to see Broadside Press introducing us to new voices and visions once again.