IMPURE

paper 0-8130-1690-8 Barnstone, a Whittier College writing professor and student of Asian literatures, displays more of the former than the latter in this first collection that, despite a few nods to Buddha, mainly follows the workshop norm in its deep images and compulsive trope-ing. Fond of the present tense and lots of gerunds, Barnstone regularizes his stanzas in straightforward poems about seeds, trees, and grass. The belabored gestures to Whitman (—I am Walt Whitman,—) lend little authority to his self-conscious grubbing in nature. —Roots— also become a dominant metaphor for all sorts of things, including the —nerve stars— in —Root Hair— that eventually —take root— and —flower into dream.— In —Dirt Jesus,— roots are —like a cancer— underground, where Jesus and Buddha live in —mindless ecstasy—; and cancer, conversely, appears in poems about his stepfather’s illness and in one suggesting his own possible cancer. Contemplating the root system in a vineyard, the poet, like Blake, imagines —a planet / in each grape.— Barnstone’s political poems simply posture about the environment, his guilt about childhood notions of Indians, and police brutality—the last in a poem where he curses the cops from an upper-floor window for rousting a drunk below. The Zen-like —electric bliss——which he finds playing video games—is also shaken by his concerns for his poetry: He worries with each mail delivery, and he broods over his father’s comment on one of his poems. Barnstone sings odes to his own penis, the joy of pissing, and women’s breasts (—breasts make me happy—). Harmless self-indulgence not helped by Barnstone’s tangled tropes, adolescent similes, and uncanny ability to pick the wrong word.