The Finger Bone

The Finger Bone by Kevin Prufer. Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 82 pp., $12.95. Short-listed for the Academy of American Poets' Laughlin Award for best second book, Kevin Prufer's collection admirably fulfills our expectations. These articulate poems--wild, touching, darkly funny--suggest a world poised between nightmare and lucid dream, a place where memory, mortality, and their abandoned remnants recur in thoughtful, even obsessive, poetic reconfigurations.

At times the presence of wasps or bees injects a necessary unease (see "Pastoral," among others), yet Prufer is most remarkable when faced with the works of Man: the wrecks of cars "very sleepy ... soft / in their rivets and rotted joints" ("Salvage Lot, Dusk") or the airplane aloft that threatens to "open like a toy," forcing the speaker to ask, "How will we be strewn, when this is over?" ("Sensual Disaster"). These junked marvels embody human ingenuity reduced to lifeless husks, and are also bodies we craft abstract versions of ourselves: in listeni ng to "The black hearts of automobiles / under the hoods," we hear also our own dark hearts subject to fatal accident. Prufer at times adopts the stance of the scientific investigator, only to find that objective inquiry leads to its own dead ends: "Technophobic Sonnet" equates a small park's demolition with a disk drive's swift erasure, while "The Astronomer's Prayer" despairs of stars that "constantly recede," finally "inaccessible" to our upward gaze. Several poems called "For the Dead" confirm Prufer' s destination, the deepest impulse of his work: "I am trying to sing a clearer song, don't go" ("For the Dead: A Clearer Song"). That plea--for a listener's attention, and for all those elegized not to disappear--comes as the book achieves its beautiful, terrible final insights: "The dead are as an echo resounding off a wall/on which someone has painted the shapes of stars" ("Trompe L'Oeil"). Here, the painted illusion deceives only the eye: the cathedral-dome looks like the night sky, "a perfect bottle blue , / traced over ... with the outlines of stars" convincing "even in the weakest candlelight." But Prufer is not deceived: neither god nor muse but only his own voice returns in the form of an echo both post-classical and post-Christian, the painted cosmos offering cold comfort. Debris-natural or manufactured, fossilized or decayed-testifies to a human presence, as when the poem "Neanderthal"'s uncovered "finger bone ... Pale comma in the ground" reveals itself part of a person, lifeless now, yet charged with history. Even as he makes strange a world grown too familiar, Prufer offers us a new one, beautiful and dangerous, in a voice both haunting and original.

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