BIBLIOFILE
The Father of the Predicaments
by Heather McHugh
(Wesleyan University Press, 80 pages, $19.95)

Heather McHugh will read at the Mountain Writers Series at the Old Church, 1422 SW 11th Ave., 236-4854. 8 pm Thursday, May 3. $10.

We see a language poet at work in Heather McHugh's latest book, The Father of the Predicaments. When language poets are good--and McHugh is an extraordinary one--they shuffle language back and forth to weave their poems, infusing them with music and wit, and revivifying the language by forcing us to stop and reconsider worn-out expressions.

In Father, McHugh moves clichés into new contexts, creating fresh-coined meanings. In Neitherer Brings Charges, we find, "The dogs eat dog, they love/ their chien sauté...." In the powerful elegy, Not a Prayer‚ one reads‚ "She had her sons and husband, grandchildren...,/ ...She had/ her druthers too." In the well-crafted piece Sun Grounded in Sky-Pool‚ one reads, "The mind is blinded/so the heart goes out" and "How move the mind to awe, its best address?"

These poems often echo Gertrude Stein, though with nothing approaching the iteration of "A rose is a rose...." However, Verdict's "I meant to think it/through. But mean/ means quite one thing alone,/ and quite another with another.../" is certainly Steinian.

The poem Streaming Audio confronts us with "as close to real as possible. No real is possible" and "real was close to close. No real/ is closable. It dreams of drumming Innisfree,/ but seems to mean it's live./ To last it has/ to flow, and so/ to stream it has to strive." But the poem is closable and is concluded with rhyme and reason--something Stein didn't seem able to do, which is where McHugh parts ways with her.

McHugh's book of poems is characterized by a wry humor and a playfulness with language that both the eye and ear will delight in.
Carlos Reyes

Voice of the Blood
by Jemiah Jefferson
(Leisure Books, 283 pages, $5.99)

Everyone knows the rules about vampires: Sunlight kills them, they sleep in coffins, they dine on blood, and if they bite you three times, you turn pale and grow fangs. But for Portland author and WW contributor Jemiah Jefferson, it's a bit more complicated. The vampires in her debut novel, Voice of the Blood, sleep on black satin sheets surrounded by adorable gothic nymph-children. They are techno-industrial performance artists. They eat burgers and fries at Denny's. They say things like "hang out" and "whatever." They have sex and they have parties. Well, not all of them.

The first vampire encountered by the book's narrator, Ariane, is strictly old school: dignified, wealthy, suicidal. Ariane is fascinated, so the vampire reluctantly allows her to study him--but only after she promises to help him kill himself. Ariane, being a glamorous female scientist, naturally falls in love with him. Thus begins a splashy, trashy romp through the undead enclaves of San Francisco and L.A., complete with elaborately sensual descriptions of sex and gore.

Indeed, Jefferson has a gift for gore. The book opens with one of the most squirm-inducing scenes I've ever read. A gut-hacking uneasiness continues through to the end of the novel, when a new vampire is born in a sloppy, violent hash of blood and viscera, melting flesh, explosions of bones, teeth and hair.

Comparisons to Anne Rice are inevitable, but Jefferson's writing is simultaneously tougher and more elegant. Voice of the Blood doesn't pretend to be high art, but it doesn't need to; it's more like an expertly crafted slasher film by a true auteur. Becky Ohlsen

Death in Holy Orders
by P. D. James
(Knopf, 415 pages, $25)

P. D. James reads at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Sunday, May 6.

Death in Holy Orders could best be described as a "theological college mystery." Set in the brooding landscape of East Anglia amid cliffs and a roiling seacoast, the book explores the backgrounds and origins of the mystery surrounding an inexplicable suicide (or was it murder?) of a popular student at St. Anselm's Theological College. The victim was the son of an important and rich man in London: a man so rich that he can call in the service of Adam Dalgliesh, P. D. James' poet/detective.

On the case, Dalgliesh (in typical James fashion) discovers myriad "dirty little secrets" surrounding the theological enclave. More mysterious deaths soon occur in this near-deserted seminary perched miles from a living town, and Dalgliesh's arduous, careful inquiry produces an unlikely familial relationship, a potential love interest for the redoubtable detective, and a remembrance of times past when Dalgliesh himself, as a youth, spent some summers in the place now under his circumspect inspection.

While I admire James' wonderful evocation of mood and place, I grew impatient with the fustian fussiness and overblown zeal from this most admired of English mystery writers.
I admit to real pleasure in looking up words that are new to me--as I had to do in the reading of this book--but that pleasure was diminished by all the superfluous psychobabble that lengthens this novel unnecessarily. Reading James' novel brought to mind the words of my first college writing instructor: "Less is more; nothing exceeds like excess." If you have an excessive amount of time
on your hands, grab this book.
Jack Booch