The Maverick Room

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2005 by Gregory Pardlo

The Maverick Room by Thomas Sayers Ellis Graywolf Press, January 2005 $14, ISBN 1-555-97414-7

It is difficult to imagine a place more fraught with contradictions than Washington, D.C. Rare, young poets have been able to take root in such soil. Few are able to flower with complex beauty. Thomas Sayers Ellis is such a poet and his debut collection, The Maverick Room, is a compendium of lyric gestures compressed into taught chords of meaning.

The work represents a synthesis of influences that is difficult to critique without reference to genres outside literature. Ellis himself says his work reflects the combined influence of poet Gertrude Stein and George Clinton, the P-Funk all-star. Ellis's obsessions are diverse.

While he writes about the culture of music, both performed and recorded, his poems aspire to performances of their own. Lines like "Go wiggle or go skate. / Only bait no feet to fail him," and titles such as "A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop" evince a performative quality. Ellis frequently sets a groove in motion through lean. percussive lines of verse. A musical "bridge" is affected in the poems by tonal shifts into aphoristic proclamations worthy of Clinton (George) and that, as asides, tend to wink knowingly at the reader. In "My Autopsy," Ellis writes, "I refuse to write for more people / Than I can listen to."

Many poems here are lyric narratives of his life in D.C. But these reflections also house his greater philosophical concerns with history and heritage. The poem "View of the Library of Congress From Paul Laurence Dunbar High School" displays economy of language. Here the capitol's monuments museums and buildings are reduced to edifices distinguished by the fanny members who are or have been employed in them. Thus, Ellis comments upon the importance of our history, and the structure of our literary canon.

Gregory Pardlo is a poet and translator who teaches at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York