"Death ... is not all / she's cracked up to be," Clarence Major announces in "Love Against Death"--and indeed, the rest of
Configurations makes a valiant effort to knock the old girl down a peg or two. Death may be a constant companion in this volume, but she's never allowed to take control; for this poet, you must accept mortality--not let it haunt you--to be truly alive. Major's first collection,
Swallow the Lake, won the National Council for the Arts Award in 1970. He has gone on to produce eight well-received volumes, all of which are represented--along with many uncollected works--in this striking overview of his career thus far. While these poems are born out of the William Carlos Williams school of plain speech, they are equally inflected by bebop's syncopated rhythms and improvisational style. One notices both in "Un Poco Loco," in which the speaker's "disconnected thoughts" riff against the steady rhythm of the grandmother preparing dinner, Ã la Williams: "To keep going, I think / disconnected thoughts: / Chatter. Chew-tobacco. / Phoenicians. Rednecks. / To keep going I watch / my grandmother hold / the chicken by its legs-- /
bauk bauk bauk!"
Throughout these poems, Major is adamant about the need to hold onto hope even while we confront our mortality. His poems approach this in numerous ways--through bursts of metaphoric images, through patterns of music and formal rhythmic structure, and through narrative interaction with others on the same inescapable journey. In the book's strongest pieces, such as "Love Against Death," all of these devices work together with moving results:
With our love, dear, we fight death,
and we fight unclear meanings.
They are like air released
in a broken scream--
at three in the morning
when your legs feel wooden.
Embrace night odors.
Embrace each other.
Rub your hands
against the roughness
of the whitewashed wall.
For now, you are alive.
In
Configurations, Major fights both death and unclear meanings in language of uncompromising clarity and precision. For now, he seems to suggest, this is what it means to be alive.
--A.J. Rathbun 