Discoveries

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Recyclopedia

Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge

Harryette Mullen

Graywolf Press: 180 pp., $15 paper

HARRYETTE MULLEN teaches English and African American studies at UCLA. These poems, from three collections published in the 1990s, reveal a poet with an unflinching eye, sifting through the facts for something beautiful. "Punched in like slopwork. Mild frump and downward drab. Slipshod drudge with chance of dingy morning slog. Tattered shoulders, frayed eyes, a dowdy gray. Frowzy in a slatternly direction." In many of the poems, like this one, characters emerge from a landscape. Boundaries between people, places and things are often blurred: "why these blues come from us / threadbare material soils / the original colored / pregnant with heavy spirit / stop running from the gift / slow down to catch up with it / knots mend the string quilt / of kente stripped when kin split / white covers of black material / dense fabric that obeys its own logic / shadows pieced together tears and all / unfurling sheets of bluish music / burning cloth in a public place / a crime against the state / raised the cost of free expression / smoke rose to offer a blessing." History, religion, generations of joy and suffering -- it's all here. "[L]eave your fine-tooth comb at home," the poet warns; "improve your embouchure," "proceed with abandon." Here are the rules, if only we would follow them.

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