Book Reviews: Tea, by D. A. Powell. Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England. / The Little Door Slides Back, by Jeff Clark. Sun and Moon Press. / Of Piscator, by Martin Corless-Smith. University of Georgia Press

176 Tea refashions memories not only of episodes with AIDS but also of personal bodily damage, strained familial relations, the gay community, fashion trends, television shows—one poem, comparing a young but world-weary trick-turner to Batman's Robin, includes the lines: “down every dark corridor of gotham I seek my next guardian … he will believe he is the one hero. In one poem, Powell looks through the record collection at a “‘lost companion’ sale,” considering the vicissitudes of memory: “any noise might easily be reduced: a matter of fading // the way the past is actively recaptured: … just a soundtrack undergoing reconstruction / he's a sinner, he's a saint [the mix as product of survival.]” Powell knows that to remain powerful and moving for newer audiences the memory's music must be recombined, fine-tuned, and turned-up, and Powell literally does this. If, as its preface claims, Tea tries to honor the dead “in the attempt to recapture [and, it must be added, remix] their voices,” then Jeff Clark's The Little Door Slides Back tries to find and maintain its voice, engaging with and fending off outside invaders and influences, most notably voice—Trakl, Desnos, and especially Michaux—which developed in the earlier, tumultous decades of this century. Joining to the common parlance words and structures from Old and Middle English, rhythms from earlier, guardian spirits—John Clare and Christopher Smart are invoked at the beginning of the book's final section, “To Absent Minister”—shards from Psalters, and images from massive, yellowed bestiaries, Corless-Smith's poems are aggregates made from the multifarious strata of English language and history, old relics turned up in a field, twisted seashells deposited by some primordial sea far inland.