POST AMERICAN CULTURAL CONGRESS

The poet adopts the stance of a helpless man (""i am at a loss i/ have nothing but/ poetry"") in a scary, degenerate age who escapes by running headlong into verse: elliptic, solecistic, lyric expression that ""can only be read aloud."" Abrams, a former professor of classics, sees progress as a militaristic and barbaric force. He turns to his writing ""to create a new civilization,"" ""to Restore what the Ancients called the Golden Age."" But politicizing still ""creep(s) into everyone's poetry"" because it is our national preoccupation, as much a part of our ethos as the sex, love and laughter with which Abrams combats his contemporary malaise. Where these poems express delight -- in ""the fat legs of the local girls dancing with each other""; in the stubborn growth of ""bull briar 'damn thing,'""--Abrams fulfills his image of the honorable beachcomber, one of those solitary men who ""salvage what they can small change lost/ on crowded hot afternoons.