DATE: Sunday, July 13, 1997                 TAG: 9707080401

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JOHN-HENRY DOUCETTE 

                                            LENGTH:   66 lines

AMERICA'S HISTORY HAUNTS SYLVESTER'S POEMS

THE MARK OF FLESH

Poems

JANET SYLVESTER

W.W. Norton. 93 pp. $19.

The poems contained in Janet Sylvester's second collection, The Mark of Flesh, in addition to being beautiful and intelligent, often explore the meaning of being American.

Sylvester, a former professor at Old Dominion University, teaches creative writing at the University of South Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in many top reviews, including Virginia Quarterly Review.

Consciousness of a brief and storied U.S. history looms over the heads of her characters. They grapple with sex and love and suffering, topics that are both separate and connected. They speak of people who went to war and returned, as in the recurring image of Sgt. Serifico, who, in Cambodia, ``bombed the faceless back into the Stone Age, as per instruction.''

Of people who waited.

The poems are delivered in simple stanzas, and many weave snippets of historic dialogue into scenes of a present.

Consider this excerpt from the title poem, in which a woman and man lie ``wet and famished'' at - in an ironic tweak of how we regard our past - the Grant and Lee Motel in Appomattox:

``A nineteenth-century photographer/would get everything in, your concentration,/my loosening sense separate from/the service to which I've devoted the best/years of my life, my own impatient honor/far from that gentleman's code.''

The words in italics are those of Lee, the Southern warrior, and Sylvester reminds you that even in the moments after love, the sexes seem to be in service for each other. Or as Yogi Berra once said, ``Thank you for making this moment necessary.''

Sylvester links blood-soaked Civil War battles to sweat-soaked battles of love. In a sly comparison, U.S. history relates to, of all things, ``The Blob.''

That gelatinous glob of B-movie evil grew with each moment, encompassing all it touched, and surpassing. In its brief mention in ``The Medium,'' it rounds out a collection of other nostalgic, sorrowful, inevitable scenes.

Nostalgia rides again in ``Miss America,'' which shows a young girl's awakening sexuality and her understanding of her parents' imperfect, connubial life.

Named for her father's ex-lover Janet, a name the father chose while the mother was drugged after birth, the girl acknowledges her mother's loss in these terse closing lines: ``You got me instead of fame./ How can we stand it? I know what he did to Janet.''

Other notable poems are ``A Seabed at This Height,'' which encompasses the act of sexuality in liquid hues, and the descriptive ``Illumination Rounds,'' intense and filled with suspense about people who know what might, but probably will not, happen in their lives. It is a fine poem about awakening.

Sylvester's work is filled with fat, clear images and people you know - including yourself. MEMO: A summer intern at The Virginian-Pilot, John-Henry Doucette also

writes short fiction. He lives in Norfolk and is a rising junior at

Virginia Wesleyan College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Janet Sylvester

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