EULOGY FOR A PRIVATE MAN

paper 0-8101-5094-8 There’s a certain uniformity of expression that borders on monotony in this second volume by the Wichita State University professor—a collection that explores silence and solitude in language that is somber and without much rhythm. Dings’s austere and attenuated metaphysics, with its relentless abstraction, allows for few things, or people, or places, but his poems are nevertheless accessible and proceed often by contraries: presence vs. absence, perception vs. reality, memory vs. forgetting. In these colorless lyrics, Dings searches among the —ruins— of the past for rare moments of kindness or —a moment / fully lived,— and in his fine poem —The Rehearsal,— he nicely restates the oft-held wish that this life were a warm-up for another chance. Dings’s serious verse seems prayer-like: He finds joy in church music; he regrets all those things left undone in —The Unlived,— and he warns against —those sublime impediments of the flesh— in the puritanical —Bodily Beautiful.— In numerous pieces, including the title homage to another man of ’silence— and —intimate alienation,— Dings seeks a —common gravity— that the family in —The Family Gatherings— discovers in their shared past and the prospect of death. Even his lighter poems’set off with the title —Scherzo——pursue the same themes, especially when he humorously identifies himself with Prufrock. Eventually, Dings’s tendency to animate abstract ideas weighs down the volume (—the weeds of misanthropy,— —the wings of despair,— —the body of the ordinary,— —the skin of your perception—). The final poem, which reconsiders Hart Crane’s suicide as an —immersion— (not a failure), allows Dings’s own morbidity to triumph in an otherwise decent volume.