Two who do the tough work of poetry

By Peter Krok

FootHills Publishing.

74 pp. $15 (paper)

By Thomas Devaney

Fish Drum. 56 pp. $15 (paper)

Reviewed by Michael Harrington

Poetry is a difficult job, by any measure. The demands it makes on the self are great and the rewards ephemeral - at least by worldly standards.

The Beats recognized that it calls for an almost religious vocation, albeit an antic one. For them, the poet is a holy goof shambling through the shining world, pointing out the transcendent in the everyday, the sunrise and the slop, the sacred and the profane.

And if being a wandering saint doesn't work out, or you want to be taken more seriously, you can always get a day job.

Here are two fine collections by Philadelphia poets, shot through with Beat sensibility and a recognition of poetry's heavy demands.

Peter Krok, by day humanities director at the Manayunk Art Center, takes on the poet's quest for insight in

Looking for an Eye

with direct, visceral language, as in the title poem: "Each time he seems to see, / a finger pokes his eye."

Krok's poems of madwomen on the corner, youthful road trips, bocce players, rec centers, and a childhood classmate killed in a fire are suffused with a haunted nostalgia for working-class Philadelphia. His work has a sharp awareness of the weariness of everyday life, as in "Second Shift": "You want to break / the dull decline of days slipping / through the stubborn hole in life / but your knuckles aren't strong enough"

He eloquently expresses the poet's struggle to connect, as in "Without":

"Am I out of key? Are these sounds / on a scale only shadows / and strangers understand?"

And with humor, as in "The Disturbance," his meditation on a cricket:

"Besides, am I in the scheme / of things? What kind of noisemaker / would you call me?"

Over all the poems in this wonderful book is the heart of poetry, tremendous imagery:

"Dew silvers morning fields. / A chill is in the air. / Geese arc / Towards Georgia."

In

A Series of Small Boxes

, Thomas Devaney, once a program coordinator at the Kelly Writers House of the University of Pennsylvania and now a teacher at Penn, mixes humor and an incisive approach to the suppleness of language.

He draws from pop culture, newspaper articles, reveries, and free-associations on literature and miniature golf.

If his approach to language is cerebral, his style is sometimes pure stand-up: "A genius kid / In seven states, ridiculed in the rest."

In "Trying to live as if it were morning":

"Take out a piece of paper and write down: / Man the builder, Man the destroyer, Man the eater / of donuts, butter cake, and pork buns."

As that shows, Devaney is skilled at balancing life's slapstick and sorrows.

It's a delight to find a poem titled "Obi-Wan Kenobi" and see that it is indeed about the

Star Wars

character, a look at the old Jedi as he waits for the epic tale to catch up to him, wondering if life has passed him by.

He makes the Red juice from concentrate

and drinks it all morning,

Says his "May the force be with you," old man prayers.

Then back to his pens, pencils,

faintly ignorant of the window, and the others, thinking,

the old giants can't turn their ships around fast enough.

Today, the pang of a long-gone love's swarmed over him,

invisible, like sand ants on a crater.

Devaney is sometimes undone by a John Ashbery-influenced concern with the surface of language, but what shines through is a keen insight into the way words redeem the meaning of the quotidian, as when he cuts to the heart of philosophical joys of home renovation in "drop ceiling," in which the removal of a previous owner's handiwork becomes metaphysical work:

"Trashed as it was, you worked towards / the ceiling, holding the ceiling - / wreckage all the way up."

Long after finishing this delightful book, individual lines stay with the reader, as in this warning to the critic, which we'll take to heart:

"People point out the violence I do to my own words, / How uncareful I can be - I duck under their commentary."