Rules of Hunger

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Fall 2003 by Huggins, Peter

LOIS ROMA-DEELEY. Rules of Hunger. Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press. Release date: March 2004. $12.95.

In reading Lois Roma-Deeley's first book of poems, Rules of Hunger, I am struck by the careful precision of her observations. Here is one from "The Given": "Plums should be cold,/in a glass bowl and offered to children." Another from "Storytelling": "I'm in the airport watching the clouds/roll onto a tarmac sky." And one from "Crossing the Desert": "At three in the afternoon, the sky in July/over Gila Bend is a holocaust of light." Roma-Deeley marshals these observations in the service of a threshold experience: that moment when you put your hand on the door and then, taking the risk, you push through into the unknown. The poems in Rules of Hunger take us through, and we go willingly.

Arranged in three parts, Rules of Hunger presents the threshold experience in the first poem, "North of Babylon," when the speaker sees "an argument/of opening doors" and continues in "The Given" with an invitation "to stop at the doorway of our past/and step into our home." Other doors appear, sometimes disastrously as in "Inside the Rush of Plastic Pink Wings" or ominously as in "Compulsions (& Obsessions)" and "Storytelling." Doors mean a passing through, even a passing over as in "Piece Work," sections of which figure in all three parts of the book. In addition, these doors lead to movement, whether in a "big finned/Lincoln" ("The Apostle of Wax and Shine") or by train: "A train rolls by,/flatbed cars moving toward Phoenix" ("Crossing the Desert"). The movement is westward - Kansas City, St. Louis, Phoenix - in "Severe Traffic," as one poem is aptly called.

This movement often serves, as it historically has in the United States, to leave the past behind, to light out, as Huck said, for the territory: "The past is more like/this poor excuse for a train, rattling on/between two fixed points - a bead and a charm - /like some bastard with his eyes staring into mine" ("Gestures"). But the poet wisely knows that the past is not so easily shed or dead: "Sometimes, in the steam/of artichokes, I see a round/dining room table with cane back/ chairs and these people are shouting:/We're not very dead" ("Too Many Ghosts"). And they are not, for, as Roma-Deeley reminds us in a quotation from Auden, "Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead."

Equally important, Roma-Deeley breaks bread with the living: "One day you go to college, take a class/and there's a woman sitting in the front row;/she refuses to turn around, to speak a word./And then it's 20 years and then it's just me/and you and this page which can't seem to say we/know this is not the end of the story" ("(Just For Today) I'm Stealing Your Story"). The poet knows it never is the end as she notes beautifully in "The Very Thing," my favorite poem in Rules of Hunger, "like the spaces/in late night conversations/I fill in what I don't know/with wanting." For this poet also knows that if she lets the bus "keep on driving" she will not miss a thing; she has everything she needs.

Peter Huggins teaches in the English Department at Auburn University. His poems have appeared in more than 100 journals, magazines, and anthologies. He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and has won the Dickinson Review Prize for Poetry. Two poems from his collection Hard Facts were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent collection of poems is Blue Angels, River City Publishing; In the Company of Owls, a novel for middle readers, is forthcoming from New South Books.