Butterfly Effect [Paperback]

Hardly longer than a chapbook with just over 40 pages of poetry, Humes's tenth collectionAselected by Pattiann Rogers for the "National Poetry" seriesArarely strays from the homey terrain of family, house, and garden. In plain-spoken, lyric meditations, these poems exemplify the writing workshop methodology that has prevailed at universities for two decades: select a mundane, autobiographical event ("Counting the Plants," "My Daughter Gives Me Her Autographed Baseball") or common object ("Onions," "Nails"), describe it with a simple and solemn grace, then vault toward some felt but indefinable intimation of one's place in the cosmos. To Humes's credit, he is skillful at this modest and familiar strategy, but the connections between the mundane and the profound can seem forced, as when the narrator, fishing, wishes for "one fish of such heft/ that my life would be forever after/ set in the arc of its power." While they strive to conjure "the plain sense of things" and generally evince a deep respect for life in its less exotic manifestations, the poems present a vision in which "the horizon barely stirs" with either humor or the surprise of a stimulated imagination in sudden flight.AFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

One of this years National Poetry Series winners, Humes (Kutztown University) has published nine previous books of poetryall, like this, deriving from his plain sense of things, as he characterizes his aesthetic in Poem with a Line from Wallace Stevens. Humes bows in awe to nature, and relies on a simple vocabulary and diction to support his easy observations. In From the Apple Tree, the poet refrains from interrupting the lovely scene of a deer eating an apple; elsewhere he sings the praises of spiders (all of that living); pigeons (a kind of music); and snakes. The best of his natural excursions have a bit of Norman Maclean about them: In Fishing the Little J. . . , he tries to raise / the spirit of this place; and, even in church, he senses the lure of water nearby (River Vows). The volume evolves into an extended memoir of his father, a coal miner and handyman: He recalls the old mans coal-streaked phlegm, his breaking up coal for the fire, his joy in shoveling snow, his theft of nails from work. The greatest tributes to the hard-working man are the things he left behind: a number of poems consider his whittled axe handle, his old shovel, his handmade walking stick, and his bird-caller. Humes seldom wallows in the hardships of his early life, and often remembers the pleasant moments: his mother fishing for carp; her mock orange bush, and her dexterity with a sewing needle. Poems about his daughter and his failure to save a sparrow reveal Humes at his sentimental worst. Humes fails to draw much insight from his observations of benign nature, and when he does (e.g.,what is it goes wrong with our knowing?), its pseudo-poetic and trivial. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.