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Books Reviews

Songs for Two Voices

mith is a rarity in the world of poetics: Hes a self-professed jock who not only went out for sports in high school, but served as an All-American tailback at Bucknell University. After receiving his masters degree in English, he played pro baseball briey with the Philadelphia Philliesa short stint characterized by a weak glovebefore packing it in for poetry professorship. Songs for Two Voices is a weak follow-up to the National Book Award nalist The Other Lover, Smiths 2000 collection that was also nominated for a Pulitzer. The 25 pieces here are

By Bruce Smith. University of Chicago Press, $22.50.

described as duets: poems of call and response, song and countersong with jazz-like rhythms. Smiths subjects include carnality, family, music, pop culture, academia and (surprise!) poetry, sometimes mixed together all in one. Composed in two-lined stanzas, an effect that cumulatively renders them at on the page, Smiths songs suffer from the same malady as much contemporary poetry: overintellectualization. The two exceptions, Song of the Suffering of the Pencil and Song with Trucks in the Distance, employ single-line call-and-response, a welcome respite for the eyes. However, they still suffer from hodgepodges of images, emotions and cultural touchstones, making the reader feel Smiths brain working through every line. But the heart gets lost or, at the very least, trampled along the way. Smith handles language masterfully, but its what he fails to do with it that leaves the reader wanting. At any moment, Smiths verses seem on the verge of ticking or tanking, and mostly they just tank. Take these lines from Song of Loss in the Form of a Cock Ring: jet fuel smell, smuggled fruit, the curtain / of I am and am I? blown open. Perhaps phrases like these are part ancient Greek chorus, part Southern Baptist revival as they have been billed, but they lack both the weight and the religious fervor that admiration suggests.Larry O. Dean

Nellcott Is My Darling

lice claims to love rock & roll, even falls in love with a boy because he approximates a musician, but her life is really more of a slow, mournful pop song. The protagonist of Frieds elegant debut novel is a quiet girl just beginning her freshman year at Montreals McGill University. Unlike a lot of kids free of their parents oppression, who cut loose in school and craft new identities out of thin air, Alice is stalled by never knowing what to thinkabout anything. Along comes Nellcott, a skinny nonstudent who works in an underground

By Golda Fried. Coach House Books, $14.95.

record shop, plays guitar and has an almost paranormal infatuation with Alice. The two form a bond typical of rst ings in college: intense, loving and prone to both shocking honesty and curious secrecy. Alices virginity becomes the one wedge separating them, mostly because shes unsure why she is protecting it. Though its a relatively simple story of a girl and a boy feeling something but not knowing what that something is, theres an hypnotic air to the novel. Each chapter is composed of jagged moments, paragraphs separated from each other by impulsive punch lines. At the end of one scene, Alice nishes watching the Cassavetes flick Husbands and steps out of that movie like stepping out of a really warm shower. After talking about how a girl he once knew had cigarette-burn scars on her arm, Nellcott lightly singes Alices forearm with the tip of his smoke. Rather than becoming enraged or hurt, Fried writes simply, She could not believe him. Theres something captivating about Frieds prose that makes Alice and Nellcotts relationship feel like a slow-motion whirlpool. Writing in such short sentences and with such a ne eye for the minutiae of relationships, she circles around emotional pivot points until the reader feels dragged into the depths of her characters, unaware of how he got there. Jonathan Messinger

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