Reviewed by:

• Voice to Voice in the Dark by Tim Hunt
• Jeanetta Mish

Tim Hunt's Voice to Voice in the Dark explores the philosophical conundrum of everyday space-time and its relationship to memory and story. The collection consists mostly of narrative poems; however, Hunt's facility with figurative language lends lyricism to the work. In "New Orleans to Austin" weariness is "a tired we finger like a bruise" (19). The speaker of "Dreaming of Trains" relates his life as a hobo whose pack is "a deep hole in the darker night" (11). In "Three Ways to Pick Prunes" the speaker's harvest work bestows "benedictions of fallen fruit" (41). [End Page 396]

The first poem after the prologue, "Vachel Lindsay Walks the Roads of Kansas Offering Poems for Bread," introduces two themes of the collection: the lives of ordinary people and meditations on memory, on past and present and "here" and "there." In the fifth stanza of "Vachel Lindsay" the poem's focus shifts from the famous poet who traded poems for food and shelter to those who shared with him their homes and meals. The speaker recognizes that their hospitality is itself a kind of a poem, "the one / they understand. / The one they / do not think of as a poem" (6).

Whitmanesque worker-portrait poems include "New Orleans to Austin," which documents an "all night bus trip" undertaken to study Kerouac's papers. In a section of the poem about fellow bus travelers, Hunt writes with tenderness about a young girl and her father, a welder. The girl's father talked of the ordinary things: "walking the girders as the buildings / took shape, the welding, / the moving from job to job—" (18). "Swing Shift" imagines the repetitious life of an assembler who stands "within a circle of light" as if he were made "for this, for / this, for // this" (9).

Again and again Hunt interrogates the irrealities of past and present, here and there. In "A Photo You Meant to Take," he writes of the postmodern preference for simulacra, that "it is the seeming to be old that counts," and that "the past is an accent, a decor" (23). "A Grammar of Things" begins, "Things survive past their time," then parses the preference for newness, born of a desire to erase the past terrors of World War II: lime green formica tabletops replaced those of stone "because it says new, says now; / just as dacron and rayon and nylon say now, say different / . . . / it says future, as if then were a dream / no longer dreamed—a long ago the war erased" (32).

In "The Boy, Discovering Leadbelly, Hears Things He Doesn't Understand" Hunt writes of the education in racism gained from Leadbelly's "voice—pained, / boisterous and sly," and how the songs exist in a time "both now and then, and you might walk with it / in that now it lines out that is neither now or then" (43).

Poems of the third section, "In That Time When Time is Not Measured," make explicit the collection's emphasis on story-as-remembrance, which collapses then, there and, instead, creates [End Page 397] in their telling now, here. In a multipart long poem entitled "The Circle," veterans gather to remember World War II: "In the circle the men are both then / and now, as if then an echo / and now still then . . ." (85). At first the men share only safe stories, anecdotes of soldier-life worn smooth by many tellings. In later gatherings they begin to share untold stories that haunt them: a battery-lead knife handle thrown at an enemy combatant, its weight "crumpling the tiny man into the mesh of vines . . ." (77). Another story relates the lingering grief and guilt of a (then) seventeen-year-old's inability to save a drowning comrade from a sinking ship: "and the body falls away . . . // and his hand still holding the hand / saved from the silence of the screaming water" (84). "The Circle" and other poems in the section reveal that the timelessness of story...

审阅者：

• 黑暗中的语音对语音作者：蒂姆·亨特
• 珍妮塔·米什

蒂姆·亨特的《黑暗中的声音到声音》探讨了日常时空的哲学难题及其与记忆和故事的关系。该诗集主要由叙事诗组成；然而，亨特对比喻语言的熟练运用为这部作品增添了抒情性。在《新奥尔良到奥斯汀》中，疲倦是“我们手指像瘀伤一样疲惫”（19）。 《火车之梦》的讲述者讲述了他作为流浪汉的生活，他的背包是“黑夜中的一个深洞”（11）。在《采摘西梅的三种方法》中，说话者的收获工作赋予了“落下的果实的祝福”（41）。[完第396页]

序言后的第一首诗《瓦切尔·林赛走在堪萨斯的道路上，为面包提供诗歌》介绍了该诗集的两个主题：普通人的生活以及对记忆、过去和现在、“这里”和“那里”的沉思。 ”在《瓦切尔·林赛》的第五节中，这首诗的焦点从用诗歌换取食物和住所的著名诗人转移到了那些与他分享家园和食物的人。说话者认识到他们的热情好客本身就是一首诗，“他们/他们理解的。/他们/不认为是一首诗的”（6）。

惠特曼式的工人肖像诗包括《新奥尔良到奥斯汀》，记录了为研究凯鲁亚克论文而进行的“通宵巴士旅行”。在诗中关于公交车乘客的一节中，亨特温柔地描写了一个年轻女孩和她的焊工父亲。女孩的父亲谈到了一些平常的事情：“当建筑物/成型时，在大梁上行走，焊接，/从一个工作转移到另一个工作——”（18）。 “Swing Shift”想象了一个装配工的重复生活，他站在“光环内”，仿佛他是“为了这个，为了/这个，为了//这个”而生的（9）。

亨特一次又一次地质疑过去和现在、这里和那里的不现实。在《你想要拍的一张照片》中，他谈到了后现代对拟像的偏好，“重要的是看起来古老”，“过去是一种口音，一种装饰”（23）。 《事物的语法》开头是，“事物超越了它们的时代而生存”，然后分析了对新鲜事物的偏好，这种偏好源于一种消除二战过去恐怖的愿望：石灰绿色的福米卡桌面取代了石头桌面，“因为它说新的” ，现在说；/就像涤纶、人造丝和尼龙现在说的那样，/它说未来，仿佛那时是一个梦想/不再是梦想——很久以前就被战争抹去了”（32）。

在《发现莱德贝利的男孩，他听到了他不明白的事情》一书中，亨特写道，从莱德贝利的“声音——痛苦的、喧闹的、狡猾的”中获得的种族主义教育，以及这些歌曲如何存在于一个时代“无论现在还是那时”。 ，你可能会与它同行/因为现在它表明既不是现在也不是那时”（43）。

第三部分的诗歌，“在时间无法衡量的时候”，明确了该集对故事作为记忆的强调，这种记忆在当时、那里崩溃了，相反，在他们的讲述中创造了[结束第397页] ，在这里。在一首题为《圆圈》的多部分长诗中，退伍军人聚集在一起纪念第二次世界大战：“在圆圈里，人们既是当时/也是现在，仿佛那时是回声/现在仍然是……” (85)。起初，这些人只分享安全的故事，以及经过多次讲述而变得平淡的士兵生活轶事。在后来的聚会中，他们开始分享困扰他们的不为人知的故事：向敌方战斗人员投掷电池铅刀柄，其重量“将这个小个子压成藤蔓网状……” (77)。另一个故事讲述了一个（当时）十七岁的年轻人无法从一艘正在下沉的船上救出一位溺水同志的挥之不去的悲伤和内疚：“尸体掉了下来……//而他的手仍然握着那只手/从船上救了出来。”尖叫的水的寂静”（84）。 《圆圈》和该部分中的其他诗歌揭示了故事的永恒性......