The Shine Poems. - book review

African American Review, Summer, 2002 by William Doreski

Calvin Forbes. The Shine Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 2001. 64 pp. $22.95 cloth/$15.95 paper.

The ghostly rhythms of the blues and the ballad tradition haunt Calvin Forbes's delicately constructed poems. Blues rhythm isn't just a question of beat: It requires syntax that is compressed and truncated to raise the emotional level of the lyric and underscore the emotional as well as the physical rhythm of both words and music. Even in relatively conventional narrative poems, Forbes practices this blues compression, but it is most apparent in lyrics like "The Plea":

Take me home
To your living room
Ride me in your limousine

You got
Brains pretty mama
Yea that put mine to shame

Though no single element of Blues is unique to the form, lines like "Ride me in your limousine" are unlikely to occur in poetry that hasn't been impacted by this peculiarly African American art.

The ballad tradition, a close cousin of the Blues, is the oldest storytelling form of music, and Forbes has learned from it the rhythms of storytelling in verse as well as the concentration of dramatic effect. He does not write ballads as such, but many of his brief narratives alternate clearly defined longer and shorter lines to enforce a syntactical momentum. This is the point of the traditional ballad stanza. In a few poems, he combines Blues rhythm and ballad stanza, as in the third stanza of "Three Folk Songs":

let's pray jesse helms
believes in hell
and that hell's paved
in porno zones

Despite the variety of genres in Forbes's collection--brief narratives, meditations, first- and third-person lyrics--each poem displays his distinctly Blues-shaped voice. The first three sections of the book consist largely of first-person poems in the characteristic manner of the contemporary personal lyric or meditative poem. Although a few deal specifically with matters of race identity, most are more immediately concerned with the problem of individual human identity. But because the Blues voice shapes all of these poems, the African American identity of the speaker, established early in the book with poems like "Namesake," "Blues Seminar," and "Stories (I)," remains discernible. It is best to read this collection as a sequence, not only to establish the cultural credentials of the speaker but also to follow the progression of thought and perception from the self-interrogation of "The Birthday Gift," through poems like "Facts" that examine the larger social contexts that shape or enable identity, to the t itle-sequence of Part IV.

The mostly third-person Shine poems of the last section of the book deal with a traditional African American folk character who is the very embodiment of the Blues as well as the title-character of a famous jazz tune. Shine bridges the African American past and present, as well as the differing cultural milieus of Blues and jazz, and so Forbes brings him into the contemporary world, giving him a girlfriend named Glow and a son named Shade ("shade son of shine"). Both allegorical and dramatic characters, these figures work through the problem of African American identity as an imperfect family, separate yet together, committed yet separated by the gap between their inner and outer lives. This gap is a personal and cultural reality, and temporarily bridging it is a continual challenge for each of the three family members. The final poem, modestly entitled "A Small Poem," thrusts the hope and pride of African American self-identity into the future:

a child can't be a man
this is why the son
had shine for his father

to learn why/what's going
down and coming up
to grow up until a grown-up

To have shine is not only to be fathered by Shine but also to possess a certain quality, a sense of self-presence in a culture that values and requires it not only for identity but also for survival.

Calvin Forbes's poetic output over the years has been small. Blue Monday (1974) and From the Shine Poems (1979) are his only previous books. But all of his poems have shine: They possess a strong sense of voice, cultural presence, and necessity. Work of this quality helps make African American literature a vital art.

[c] 2002 William Doreski