Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 17

Detroit rnrr prfsssunday, april 22. S3 I II II ulitzer winner steps Short lyrics further into Albany 0 Albanyl By William Kennedy Little, Brown, 402 pages, $25 Review by Reg Gale xm mm 1 I 1 1 rt licit 1 i 1 are long on intensity By RIPLEY HOTCH Detroit Magazine Editor Modern poetry is working in a very narrow range. That is both good and bad. In general, there is no interest in rhyme. There is also almost no interest in the long poem.

Almost every collection is made up of short lyrics in the first person. And the lyrics in general have short lines. The trouble is, short-line lyrics without rhyme are so easy to imitate that in the hands of a lesser poet, they all begin to sound the same. The good thing is that these limitations in themselves help create a style for the good poets, to take the place of rhyme, scansion, and traditional forms of the older poets. A random (really random) survey of about 50 volumes of the hundreds published in 1983 and so far in 1984 reveals some special work by fine poets, several of them working in Michigan (or calling Michigan home).

Chief among these are Marge Piercy and Lawrence Joseph. Piercy, who seems to be a writing machine these days, has weighed in with "Stone, Paper, Knife" (Knopf). She has a fine feel for the crucial pun that carries argument to a new level, prevents it from being self-serving, maudlin and self-pitying. This is a major accomplishment for a contemporary poet making fresh the theme of a woman trapped by an unfeeling, demanding man: "He wanted an open relationship, he announced, but nothing seemed open to me." tangential A great intelligence works through these poems, and for that we should all be grateful. She is able in the title poem to sum up what poetry ought to be about: "Grace shines in precisely doing what the structure makes difficult." Piercy, as with the best of the new poets, uses ordinary language to illuminate the interior landscape, to make it accessible and yet to keep it mysterious.

ANOTHER MICHIGAN POET who does that well is Lawrence Joseph. In "Shouting at No One" (University of Pittsburgh Press), Joseph uses the shortest of lines and the most familiar of landscapes: Detroit. His poems are full of images and places in the city. The events of his life are shared by enough that the spare lines invite us to fill them out with what we know of the riots of 1967; the Arab community; the auto factories and workers; the run-down neighborhoods that were once fine; gangs, murders, Catholicism. Throughout the collection, Joseph, who is now an attorney in New York, offers no great hope, merely compassion, a requiem for what has been lost, both personally and to the city.

"The fog says, Who will save Detroit now? A toothless face in a window shakes No, sore fingers that want to be still say, Not me." (From And in the title poem: "It's not me shouting at no one in Cadillac Square; it's God roaring inside me, afraid to be alone." Joseph is well worth reading. Faye Kicknosway, a Michigan poet, writes a single long poem, "She Wears Him Fancy in Her Night Braid" (The Toothpaste Press), although it has the feel of a series of loosely connected short lyrics. Her poem is about the distance between men and women and particularly the need of men to separate themselves from women. Men become silly and squeamish before William Kennedy, author of Albany!" won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel, "Ironweed." Faye Kicknosway's drawings complement her book of poetry, "She Wears Him Fancy in Her Night Braid," in which she explores the nature of birth, courtship and female consciousness. female images: "I took the Moon from my pocket, it ovulating.

He thought it fat, nasty would not speak to it until it got better." The sardonic, angry humor of Kicknosway will probably be off-putting to most men, and that's a shame. Hers is a fresh and important voice. The same cannot be said for Margo La Gattuta's confessional "Diversion Road" (State Street Press Chapbooks). She has said she is interested in a wider audience than usual for poetry, and the poems in this collection certainly are accessible in their language. Many of the images are fine or funny: "her body has begun to grow out of control.

Across the field her buttocks loom like two air balloons rising over the hill" (From "Fat But in general the poems seem dated, and offer neither a compelling voice nor a strong intelligence just yet. La Gattuta may well grow into her potential. A NUMBER OF established non-Michigan poets came out with new work in the past year, notably John Hollander, W.S. Merwin, James Merrill and A.R. Ammons.

Hollander's "Powers of Thirteen" (Athene-urn) is a collection of near sonnets of 13 lines each, all addressed to the same "you." The alteration of the sonnet form is a little like hearing music played deliberately off-key. Such effects are not available to anyone who is not a master of the whole landscape of poetry, and can play fully in it, A.R. Ammons' "Lake Effect Country" (Norton) is a collection of highly intellectual, argued poems. The images are used for illustration and are often not central to the argument of the poem. Ammons seems to give in to the impulse to lecture.

I like best his rather playful rags: "the mind figures but even though it wants to do well never comes up with the source of what it comes up with" (From "The Spiral W.S. Merwin's "Opening the Hand" (Atheneum) uses the longish line, broken in the middle by spaces rather than punctuation, that he has made his trademark. He likes to suggest mysteries beyond the plain speech he uses, but of all the poets, Merwin seems most likely to become too private to follow. At their best, his poems reach for universal themes, intensely stated because of the impulse to privacy of the speaker: "My friend says I was not a good son you understand 1 say yes I understand." What the poetry of the past year seems to be giving up in technical range, it seems to be making up in intensity. Not a bad trade.

The 8th annual Michigan Poetry Festival, sponsored by the Poetry Resource Center, will take place April 27-28 at the Book Cadillac Hotel. For schedule, call 964-0888 weekdays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Some gems surfaced at small press book fair Small presses, which are proliferating in this country at the rate of 200 a month, are not new to Michigan, but each exists in relative obscurity. On a recent stormy Saturday, 15 exhibitors and more than 200 book lovers, librarians, collectors and dealers, braved the weather for what was billed as the "First All Michigan Small Press Book Fair." It was hosted by the Clarke Historical Library of Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, and organized by the library's new director, Bill Mulligan.

It turned into an exuberant occasion. Mike McCollum, partner at Avery Color Studio, Au Train, said: "It was well worth the trip, even if we had sold nothing. We hope it becomes an annual event." By 3 p.m. Saturday Avery had sold 97 copies of various regional titles. Avery is distinguished for fine color work.

Among the finds from other exhibitors: William Miles and Tiny Tomes: "Lanham's Michigan: Memories of Michigan," (1841), a miniature volume printed on Miles' 100-year-old Pearl foot treadle press, $10. "The Unknown Creature," soft-cover miniature, by Miles' daughter, Amy, $4. (These little books moved briskly.) JOHN CUMMING AND his Rivercrest House: Cumming, well-known to Michigan collectors, prints his books on a 91 -year-old Chandler Price press. He has published a number of books on Michigan history and a series of books on the California Gold Rush. "I published 'Diary of a some years ago," he said, "and as usual didn't charge enough, $10.

It recently turned up in a California dealer's catalog for $50." But Cumming, just retired as Clarke's director, hasn't raised prices. His current title, "Little Jake of Saginaw," is also priced at $10. Little Jake? "He was a clothing merchant," said Cumming, "who went to Detroit, built the Majestic Building, then went on to Colorado and shot himself." Black Letter Press, Ann Arbor, Donald Teeth: "Early Stories of the Great Lakes," $7.75. A facsimile copy of a $500 book, "Great Trans-Continental Railroad Guide," (1869), by Bill Dadd, the Scribe, paper, $4,50. "Wolves Against the Moon," by Julia Cooley Altrocchi, $17.50.

Talponia Press, Alden, Harry Bollinger: Bollinger is Michigan's newest private press publisher, casting his own type, and his first two titles are exquisite: "Minor Masterpieces," works written as children by 10 great authors, $12; "Imaginary Conversations," by W. S. Landor, $15. Bollinger is an artistcraftsman. Bruccoli Clark, Birmingham, Frazer Clark: Elegant, rare editions.

"A Flower in Her Hair," by James Gould Cozzens, signed, $40. A story literally lost from Cozzens' first collection, never before published. "Zodiac," by James Dickey. Original manuscript, signed, 61 copies only, $500. "Ernest Hemingway's First Book" (three stories, 10 poems, first published in Paris) $15.

"We went to Miss Mary (Hemingway's last wife) and said, 'This should be available in an inexpensive edition' and she agreed," reports Clark. "Whistle," by the late James Jones, first chapter of the working manuscript, $35. OTHER EXHIBITORS: Fallen Angel Press, Leonard Kniffel, Highland Park, poetry, nicely illustrated; Blaine Ethridge Books, Detroit, Latin American texts, bilingual children's books; Green Oak Press, Donna and Jim Taylor, Hamburg, "Log Cabins and Hard Cider," $24.95, first Michigan political campaign; NeitherNor Press, Dennis McBee, Ann Arbor, chap-book, "Eat $2. Rosie Recalls Publications, Rose Mary Pinchback, Clawson, "Bird Watcher's Record Book," pen and ink drawings, Valley Family Publications, Auburn, "The Viefnam Veteran (Two Years After)," by Charles Va'y, $3.50, novel, stapled; Clarke Historical Library, assorted Michigan titles and classic children's reprints; Enigma Press, Earl Nitschke, Mt. Pleasant, specializing in Friedrich Nietzsche; Sylvan Publications, Kathleen Ripley Leo, Northville, "Waiting for Apples," a fine anthology of children's poetry.

For catalogs of all exhibitors, write Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, 48859. They'll send addresses. "In Washington, politics is handled with the carrot and stick approach. In Albany, they just use the stick." The speaker, Tom Wilkinson, was once a reporter for the wire services in Albany, N.Y.

When he made that statement, however, he had risen to assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, so he knew both cities. His point was that Washington's politics was, for most, just a hard-played game. But in Albany, the political approach is best described in more basic, bread-and-butter terms: Albanians know where their bread is buttered in city hall and who holds the knife the Albany County Democratic machine. Albany's is the last of the great political machines forged in the ethnic fire of the early 1900s. It is an era captured perfectly by William Kennedy in his trio of Albany novels: "Legs," "Billy Phelan's Greatest Game" and "Ironweed," winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The characters in these novels inhabit a city where a man is known by the neighborhood which keeps him. Kennedy's recently-released non-fiction work, Albany!" takes his readers one step further. It shows how one of the toughest political machines in America was spawned in both physical and spiritual terms in those neighborhoods. KENNEDY INTRODUCES the reader to Albany with an anecdotal chapter on the heavily Irish North End where he grew up. Then, in a seamless style that glides from chapter to chapter, he describes the other ethnic neighborhoods and finally deals with the factors and people that set Albany apart.

These factors are largely political with Albany's fascinating Irish-WASP Democratic machine being the focus around which "0 Albany!" is built, just as the enduring machine has been the city of Albany's focus since 1921. Says Kennedy about the machine, "I believe it was a common Albany syndrome for children to grow up obsessed with being a Democrat. Your identity was fixed by both religion and politics, but from the political hierarchy came the way of life: the job, the perpetuation of the job, the dole when there was no job, the loan when there was no dole, the security of the neighborhood, the new streetlight, the new sidewalk, the right to run your bar after hours or to open a card game on the sneak. These things came to you not by right of citizenship. Republicans had no such rights.

They came to you because you gave allegiance to Dan O'Connell and his party. The power he held was so pervasive that you often didn't even know he existed until you contravened it. Then, God help your poor soul. Cast into outer darkness." The machine was founded by an Irish saloonkeeper's son, Daniel P. O'Connell, with the financial support of wealthy WASP patrician Edwin Corning.

(Coming's son, Erastus, served as mayor of Albany for 42 years a national record for mayors before he died in 1983). It has, when challenged, bested governors, special prosecutors and a half-dozen state investigative bodies. The technique, as described by Kennedy, was simple and devastatingly effective. Since the machine controlled all the levers of local government, when the investigators came to town O'Connell and Corning turned the tables and had Albany district attorneys and grand juries loyal O'Connell Democrats all investigate the investigators. THE CHARM OF Kennedy's Albany" is that it is part journalism, part history and all love and lyricism.

We see the city by neighborhood, ethnic and social; we attend the murder of Legs Diamond; we're in on the infighting engendered by the raising of Nelson Rockefeller's baby, the South Mall; we meet Erastus Corning, His Honor the Mayor. Kennedy seems to sum up his own viewpoint on the historical book as a living thing in the second chapter when he tells the reader how he would run a city library: "If I ran a library, I would recruit aged vagrants and shopping-bag ladies to come and use my facilities and hobnob sedately with the scholars in the far corner. It would give the place tone. It would keep me reminded of the need to preserve what I can of the receding past, and of my function as a keeper of universal and not merely elitist verities." His novels and "0 Albany," his first non-fiction book, serve exactly this function. Reg Gale, a Free Press assistant city editor, is former executive news editor of the Albany Times Union.

Spy tale has a touch of Michigan suspense and mystery mtmmmmmm Detroit's best-sellers Detroit U.S. Previous Current Week Week rr FICTION The Ha Urls Aqultalne Progression Ludlum Heretics of Dune Herbert Poland Michener Lord of the Dance Greeley The Danger Francis Pet Sematary King Smart Women Blume Who Killed the Robins Family? AdlerChastain Butter Battle Book Seuss One More Sunday MacDonald 10, Reviews by Bill Diem The Catenary Exchange, by Jon Winters, Avon original paperback, 296 pages, $3.50 The catenary is the curve of a stout cord stretched across the Berlin Wall. At the book's climax, several people try to slide along it from East to West. Before that happens, Neville Conyers, a British spy with a taste for the finer things in life, is saved from a killer in the Caribbean through the intervention of the Soviet spy grandmaster Anton Drakov. Drakov needed Conyers alive for his own purposes.

Michigan readers can spice a familiar dish by watching out for home state references; the author is really Ypsilanti's Gilbert Cross. Teeth of the Wolf, by Alain Paris, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 195 pages, $15.95 When a crazed Fuhrer orders Hermann Goring assassinated because Goring has been talking surrender with the Allies, he wants the job done by an elite SS squad of British turncoats. The commando fighting is rough and ruthless, but the German officer has time to fall in love with a beautiful farm maid on the way to the mountain fortress. The Salamandra Glass, by A.W. Mykel, St.

Martin's Press, 483 pages, $14.95 As a crazed Fuhrer cranks up his war machine, a secret group of powerful men, linked by their possession of identical glass pendants, looks forward to a united Europe. Years later, a Viet vet, son of an American novelist, with the help of a supersecret multinational spy group, begins chasing down the origins of the group after his father is brutally murdered. The action is as complex and convoluted as the handmade pendants, but not as well designed. The opposing supersecret, superpowerful societies are superoutlandish. Firefox Down, by Craig Thomas, Bantam, 340 pages, $14.95 Clint Eastwood did the movie version of pilot Michael Gant, and the movie is already forgotten.

But for devotees of the Mig-31, which responds to the pilot's thoughts as long as he thinks in Russian here comes the sequel. When it begins, readers learn that Gant's successful theft of the Firefox and defeat of its sister prototype was only the beginning of the escape. In fact, he's in more danger than before, and he must see a lot more blood before he's in sight of England. Fatal Obsession, by Stephen Greenleaf, Dial Press, 250 pages, $14.95 The quiet detective from the big city comes back to his sleepy little hometown to take care of family business. The family business turns nasty when his nephew, a Viet vet whom no one liked much, is found dead.

John Marshall Tanner figures it was murder, and when he starts stirring around in the past, things don't smell too good. Dead Heat, by Linda Barnes, St. Martin's Press, 1 94 pages, $11.95 Linda Barnes is from Detroit, though she now lives in Boston. That's handy, because her hero, heir, actor and ex-detective Michael Spraggue, lives there, too. The Boston Marathon is the background for a murder mystery and dirty politics that involve Spraggue, a pretty girl, and Spraggue's rich, blueblooded, eccentric Aunt Mary who never sleeps and who loves the detective business.

Quicksilver, by Bill Pronzini, 151 pages, St. Martin's Press, $11.95 The author is determined to make us care about a character whose name he won't tell us. It goes against the trends of civilization, but maybe that's why the Nameless Detective has stood out from the pack since the series started a half-dozen adventures ago. By the next book, 'Less will have a partner: Eberhart, disenchanted former policeman. This last solo case starts with a secret admirer sending Haruko Gage expensive jewelry, bounces back in time to the Tule Lake Relocation Camp, a piece of American shame in World War II, and includes a little ritual samurai sword murder.

Night work, by Joseph Hansen, 172 pages, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $12.95 Dave Brandstetter is an independently rich private eye who investigates insurance claims because he's good at it. As he explores a toxic waste hauling scam that has led to murder, he displays his smarts and his courage and his sensitivity to the plight of the poor in L.A. He never fails to note a good lookin' bod when he sees one, but he's not promiscuous; he and his lover, Cecil, a guy who used to work for a TV station, have a stable relationship. Die Again, Macready, by Jack Livingston, 262 pages, St. Martin's Press, $13.95 Joe Binney is smart, courageous and deaf.

When the TV big shot starts speaking in such a low voice that the bankers he's fleecing have to lean forward, Joe leans back relaxed and reads lips. But he can't do it when he's drunk. Or when he's recovering from a ferocious beating at the slum apartment of his client, eccentric actor William Macready, whose business manager ran off with the nest egg. Binney is in the wiseacre tradition; even if he can't hear his own voice, he snaps off some pretty good lines. Bill Diem is chief of the Free Press universal copy desk.

GENERAL 1. Tough Times Never Last Schuller 2. Motherhood: Second Oldest Profession Bombeck 3. March of Folly Tuchman 4. Lines and Shadows Wambaugh 2 3 1 1 6 4 7 -9 6 8 5 3 8 4 7 5 10 10 2 9 1 5 3 4 4 2 5 7 2 1 8 6 8 10 6 9 3 9 7 10 1 3 4 1 2 2 5 4 Mayor Koch 6.

People of the Lie Peck 7. Tough-Minded Faith for Tenderhearted People Schuller 8. On Wings of Eagles Follett 9. Discoverers Boorstin 10. Mafia Princess GiancanaRenner One Writer's Beginnings Welty Further Up the Organization Townsend In Search of Excellence PetersWaterman ADVICE HOW TO 1.

James Coco Diet Coco 2. Eat to Win Haas 3. Nothing Down Allen 4. Putting One-Minute Manager to Work RlannhardLorber mw mm mmimmim 5. Weight Watchers Fast and Fabulous Cookbook 3 Life Extension Companion PearsonShaw 5 The Detroit list Is based on a survey of area bookstores.

The national list Is compiled by the New York Times..