SARGASSO


Jonathan Small.
Death of a Pineapple Salad: Selected Poems 1976-1986.
Barbados: Letchworth Press, 1987.



 Jonathan Small's new collection entitled Death of
a Pineapple Salad Selected Poems 1976-1986 offers,
according to Elaine Savory Fido's introduction, "a new
vision of familiar kinds of experience: friendship,
isolation, death, love." While such experience makes
these poems, Savory's panegyric claims vision which
might be hard to substantiate in much greater poets
than Small. Her insistence on "a rhetoric which
captures a sense of the ordinary," a poetry which is
"deeply philosophical," and a "power" which takes "us"
beyond "surfaces and easy assumptions to a constantly
fresh assessment of our context and our experience" is
stuff pertinent to Wordsworth and stuff enough to
discourage introductions in books by young writers.

 The matter of Small's poetry is diverse but traditional:
sex, religion, politics, and death. Small's speakers
explore the fragility of relationships, the inadequacy
of the pulpit, the solipsocracy of modern life, the
unknown territory of ends, in a poetry which seems in
search of a voice. Struggling in the inhospitable urbs
of Bridgetown and Philadelphia, London and Paris, Small's
personae lack the logos of their convictions: a poetic
language. The consequence of which is that the poems
read like the tracings of something yet to be.

 If poetry is also mapping of things, then place assumes
the significance of home. While "all roads" may "lead to
the city" (Sitting Decent), the speaker in the "Bridge-
town" section of Reconstruction 1976-1984 writes: "There's
a safer place northside; you/head south. The road leads
into smaller alleys/blighted for life." Daring the dark
road, the speaker discovers home: a place of familiar
streets and cafes, of the "Zanzibar" with its "Copper