Mortal Love: Selected Poems (1971-1998)
By Franklin Abbott
161 pp., Liberty, TN: RFD Press

Franklin Abbott entreats the reader in the introduction to Mortal Love, his beautiful and broad selection of poems (1971-1998), to "sound these words as you read them," to "en-chant yourself or others with these sounds and silences." It is good advice. One does not need the benefit of an accompanying melody to recognize in much of the poetry true lyrics, awaiting the color and nuance of the music of the individual voice.

I would add a second piece of advice: Don't read these poems page by page. Skip around. The organization of the book into sections, perhaps having more to do with WHEN they were written rather than how one progresses through them, only encourages one to reach a destination, a denouement. One COULD start easily with the almost Faulkner-esque elegy of Turner County Breakdown:

Turner County
breaks
down
in long days
and lonesome nights
in promises
in broken dreams
in fears come true
in the unending heat
of that day in Fall
when I left

One could do this. One could progress on through the sections that follow &endash; Engenderment, Everyday Miracles, Mystery Schools, sections of virtual and literal travelogues of the mind &endash; and then land penultimately on the heart-wrenching title poem, Mortal Love, and Battle Fatigue, both rendered from a life scarred by the scourge of AIDS and too-early deaths. But to venture a guess, this is not what Mr. Abbott would have the reader, the speaker, the en-chanter, do. He offers up his lifeline, looking backward, inward, forward, outward, but the poetry is almost always of the moment, standing still but never static. Suspend your thoughts and just BE, he seems to be saying, in poems such as Patience as an Art Invisible:

patience is what happens
as we gamble
through the middle
it's the moment
when the dice have left
the hand but haven't hit
the table

Abbott's work as a psychotherapist and well-respected commentator on men's studies and gender, most recently as editor of Boyhood: Growing Up Male (University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), provides the backbone for a wealth of poetry and prose in this collection that celebrates both the commitment and eroticism specific to men's relationships. For those of us who grew up gay, particularly in rural settings, the subject of his Lovers Found in Magazines is a refresher course on male lust manifesting itself among the periodicals at the local Woolworth's. How many of us know this man?: A STREET CORNER COWBOY...AN ANGEL OF THE HIGHWAYS..SPREAD OUT SLICK CHIAROSCURO..WITH STAPLE IN THE MIDDLE..

Having embraced this lust in this and other poems, he then gives us an astonishing honesty and clarity in his passages on experiencing the passion of a man's love for another man. While the poetry is again very much "in the moment," Abbott moves us through our boyhoods, our manhoods, as he has moved through his own, so that we come upon In the Absence of our Fathers and pause for just a split second before throwing our arms in the air and dancing:

in the absence of our fathers
on a path we call compassion
in a blur and trembling to the quick
the boys who played in flowers
are holding one another
are pressing close together
and singing to the wind...

Interspersed through all this is an awakening to the delights and mystery of places both distant and familiar. Abbott, an early-on leader in the Radical Faerie movement, takes the reader to Roan Mountain in North Carolina, one of the first Faerie gathering places, to invite one to dance for the sun to make love with the cloud; for golden light to penetrate the mist of gray and circle [our] circle. Through sections of prose and more lyrics, he roams from his native environs of southern Georgia to the cliffs of Chaco Canyon, County Cork in Ireland, Caracas, and Kamakura and Kyoto. This reviewer has been to the temples of Kyoto, and my memory found its voice in Abbott's inspiring capture of a moment in one of the pavilions: The stones in the sea of sand raked in the pattern of ocean waves render eternity available in a glance. His magic lies not so much in his ability to capture stones such as these, witnessed in 1989, and retain them undisturbed, but more in his ability then to splay them out in the patterns of his verse so that the reader sees them in the same light.

So it is that one should get the urge to traverse this poetry and prose without a travel guide or pagination. How wonderfully the various works speak when one skips from a grandfather's funeral in Alabama to a "wet grass" morning in a location undefined, to a fable on dreams entitled How the Earth Became a Star to the embrace of a loving partner --without embracing the virus that overcomes him --to a Venezuelan radio broadcast picked up from thousands of miles away.

One finally hears in this volume of poetry, if spoken aloud as the poet suggests, a connection with all things spiritual. Abbott knows his spirit well, and knows that it is a tangible thing. In Religion in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, his alternative version of The Lord's Prayer, intoned by spirits in the after-life, ends with, "For Thine is the Substance; The Blood and the Flesh; In Time and in Space; Amen." The prayer occurs in the most ephemeral section of the volume, and perhaps the most enjoyable, entitled Magic and Amazement. Practitioners of the plastic arts and poets at times have preferred not to title their individual works. But Abbot chooses his well, and draws the reader in in this section with titles such as A Blessing for Relationships, Smoothing and Rounding, and Reminders, in which he encapsulates in the first phrases so much of what the entire collection speaks:

to be present in my life
to own my singing heart
as mine
to feel my body
as home for my spirit
in time and in dimension

Whether one sings his words as they should be sung, skips around or stays within the arc of the organization of the poetry and prose as presented, one should always come back to a Reminder such as that. En-chanting.