Letters Drawn in Water by Jerry Hamby pulls the reader into an empirical world where metaphorical device often has been discarded for metonymy. The movements in Hamby's poems flow with their reflective pauses, and through these considerations each poem contains units of being, rather than expressions of comparison. The nature of each poem hinges on the density of metonymy, thoroughly padded with description, yet not to a degree enlightening enough to raise the poetic scaffolding. At best Hamby's telescopic insights work with language and movement together, as in "Terlingua": "In the graveyard down the road, a woman tends / a family plot." Within "tends" the reader discovers an echo of "attends," and when shouldered next to the pun on "plot" the lines suddenly become layered, able to ladder the reader to another level of insight. The bulk of Hamby's images, however, remain untouched by this depth of language, and like the most-commonly occurring action inside Letters Drawn in Water, each poem just is.

The bulk of the movements between poems rest on Hamby's ability to adopt or understand a persona, a thin, often blurry veil that risks authorial projection. Hamby occasionally tries to avoid this by objectifying his insights, a maneuver that more often leads to inconclusive endings. In "Chinati", a fifty-year gap between the narrator's experience in a German prisoner-of-war camp and encountering the camp as a contemporary art museum does not ignite any sort of revelation within the narrator. The narrator decides the art is "silent as sleeping soldiers," and the significance of this remains dubious, challenged by the simple fact that it does not force the reader to reflect. Too often just as the reader thinks an insight will appear, Hamby turns away to continue his description, like in "Abiquiu", the line "[O'Keeffe] bought the house for its..." is in the beginning and the middle of the poem, but the significance of this development is lost within the chronology of description accounting momentary O'Keeffe activity.

Hamby's poetry works well when he pulls direct elements from his persona's works and, rather than analyzing and prodding them with description, "running with them." In "Wheat Field with Crows" he weaves an organic canvas, combining Van Gogh's painting with his death, and using the crow (and its orientation with death) as a method of connecting the two. Yet in the next poem, an address to Anne Sexton in a poem titled with her name, he appears to be attempting the same kind of movement, starting with a variation of an allusion to Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" with the opening line, "You did not slip into that starry night." The poem's concluding lines, "You shut your eyes and fell / into darkness, blackest of blooms," frames a poem that does not succeed in explaining the significant difference between "slip" and "fell," nor does it justify the allusion to Thomas.

The gems of this chapbook occur towards the end, where Hamby discards his persona masks and invests his life into his lines. The poems meander through a relationship, exploring the peaks and troughs of what ultimately ends as a tragic love affair. Here the reader discovers Hamby's ability to finalize a poem with haunting imagery, one of the more powerful examples occurring at the end of "Fire":

            I awoke
            from a feverish dream at daybreak,
            and you were stretched out
            on the window seat,

your face pressed against
            the screen, your naked form
            visible to strangers passing
            on the street below.

The vulnerability that exists here, within the narrator's observation and the line's ability to play with the nude body as a screen, is one of the rare instances that Hamby's images can speak for themselves. This ending, rather than just being, brings the reader closer to the narrator while creating a sense of personal investment on the author and reader's part. It is in this latter portion of Letters Drawn in Water that we experience the climax of Hamby's ability, and it is here that the reader becomes involved with the poems, rather than an outside and uninitiated observer.

Todd Dillard (TX)  is the recent recipient of the 2004 Penani Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in Poesis and Pebble Lake Review. He is completing his honor's thesis in creative writing-poetry under the direction of Nick Flynn and Claudia Rankine at the University of Houston.