Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503040024
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY DAN GRIBBIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In the best lines and most striking images of ``Color Documentary,'' her first volume of poetry, LuAnn Keener (who teaches at Virginia Tech) offers an uncommonly honest commentary on the perplexities of modern life and modern love.
In the lives of all of us a few clues point to the fundamental truths, signs and symbols hidden under the veneer of custom and obscured by the reticence of those whose pain we can never fully know. With a keen eye for detail and a deft metaphorical touch, Keener shares with us her examination of the evidence at several levels.
Keener's poetry proceeds from an unmistakably feminine view. Some of the strongest poems are those focused on her sense of wonder at the trials of women she has encountered, including her mother and her grandmother. The challenges posed by her own rites of passage are treated with unblinking candor, yet without the blatantly confrontational quality that invests so much of women's poetry today. Keener has a gift for inviting us into the mystery, leaving implicit the message, affording us that critical space to feel vibrations from our own experience.
The most poignant lines in the book are contained in its longest poem, ``Upon the Waters.'' The poem chronicles a love which has given way to deep disillusionment, followed by a hope of reconciliation:
Each of us
became smaller then, diminishing points
on the two sides of a slowly widening angle.
We are almost past the time of that journey,
know each other now as one might know
a friend come back from death. Haven't we
come back, don't we believe
that selves which die feed those which
survive? Aren't we learning how to row?
The speaker's poignant desire for those questions to be answered positively, even in the face of disheartening evidence, is characteristic of the vulnerability at the heart of LuAnn Keener's poems. Fully aware of the passing of an order, a global loss of innocence, a universal inadequacy to comprehend the moment and seize the opportunity at hand, she calls upon herself to greet the Thoreauvian promise of the new day with the pluck of a latter-day Eve:
I let words rest, pick up the camera,
step out in crackling frost to catch the leaves
repeating the sun in brilliant dialects.
May they teach us how to speak and dress
in ruined Eden, before our nakedness.
``Color Documentary'' is a handsome volume, a wonderful selection of poems. LuAnn Keener has much to teach us about the art of living and the art of poetry.
Dan Gribbin teaches at Ferrum College.
by CNB