Steal the Bacon

Like bright graffiti in a schoolyard, Charles Martin's poems "renew the ancient complaint/ of speech against stone." Serious and playful-- often at the same time-- they give form to the part of us that resists blank walls. "Steal the Bacon" shows Martin at his inventive best, drawing figures in language. That language ranges from prehistoric scrimshaw to the word on the sign at the end of the world. At Crusoe's command, Friday narrates a long poem in eighteenth-century diction, giving "a true Account of our Life together/ in all Particulars"; another man teaches English to recent immigrants in a new land that they will discover "exists only in what we say about it." Poems eavesdrop on various nesting places in which domesticity translates the language of desire, or explore the silences of a landscape without history, perhaps without a future.

But throughout "Steal the Bacon, " voices affirm the present, even if they can affirm nothing else. The word on the sign at the end of the world is "Yes."