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BOOK REVIEW                                DENT

journeys are interesting in that they have followed somewhat opposite routes: Troupe from St. Louis to New York, where he now lives and works; Thomas from the Bronx to the Southwest, particularly Houston, where he has lived and worked for the past ten years. Both writers have been active in a broad spectrum of black literary and cultural spheres in addition to pursuing their individual artistic careers.

Lorenzo Thomas developed out of the Lower East Side Umbra group in the early sixties as a teenage poet, going on to Vietnam and to the Southwest-a rather unlikely journey in itself. In the generous sampling of Thomas's recent work featured in Chances Are Few, one encounters poems that are intensely non-ideological whose "voice" has the aspect of a moving presence commenting on the ironies and absurdities of the perceived world. The perceptions reflect a certain detachment, being devoid of emotional peaks and valleys. The terrain explored is cluttered with the everyday of popular American culture: TV, radio, movies, beer, motels, advertisements, bars, music-both popular and rarified-and deejays. The cumulative effect is of a landscape that is both busy and empty. Thomas's Southwest is an absurd but, at the same time, strutting wasteland:

Torchy songs sputter down
Smooth as faded denim
Muzak
Annoying ooze into the lobby
As very few people check in.
And even fewer fumble
For American Express cards

And there is none
To remark the clerk's boredom
Just an off day in the motel game
In Tulsa. . . .

(from "A Rule of Thumb")

The surrealism in his style evokes New York, a world in which he discerns the individual buffeted from side to side by the immense senselessness of it all. "Hot Red," a prose poem inspired by the New York City blackout of the sixties, is a good example. Other poems, like "Too Much One Things, Not Enough Somewhat Else," "They Never Lose," "Hiccups" and "Guilt," dealing with man/woman interaction, are among the most impressive, though Thomas's work is always introspective:

. . . The rarity of what we've felt
Seems done

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 14:54:37