"Hardheaded Weather": Desires unmet across the great racial divide

"Hardheaded Weather"

by Cornelius Eady

Putnam, 204 pp., $25.95

In "Discourse of the Young Poem," first published in 1980, poet Cornelius Eady wants "something different," such as "poems / To metamorphose / Into paintings!" and "A close-up / Of the face of God / On every television / In the nation." But before all that comes to pass, he says, he wants "Money for reading poems."

Almost three decades later, that last desire seems to have been fulfilled. Cornelius Eady is now a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and has won many awards, including prizes from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. And on the evidence of the finely crafted, wide-ranging poems collected in "Hardheaded Weather," he has come about as close to fulfilling those other wishes as a poet is likely to get.

More accurately, perhaps, Eady succeeds in making us feel what it's like to have so many desires go unfulfilled. In "Sherbet," he describes the experience of "A black man with / A white wife" awaiting service "like a criminal" in a hotel restaurant in the South. He watches the waitress as she ignores them, and he wonders

What poetry

Could describe the

Perfect angle of

This woman's back as

She walks, just so,

Mapping the room off

Like the end of a border dispute ...

That "border dispute" never really ends, and Eady depicts its casualties in the poems collected here from his 2001 volume, "Brutal Imagination." All of these poems are written in the voice of "the young, nonexistent black man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children." (In the notorious South Carolina murder case Eady references, the children were later found dead in Smith's car, which she had dumped in a reservoir, apparently because her lover made getting rid of the children a condition for continuing their relationship.) How much of the experience of being black is, after all, the invention of the white imagination?

Like a bad lover, she has given me a poisoned heart,

It pounds both our ribs, black, angry, nothing but business.

Since her fear is my blood

And her need part mythical,

Everything she says about me is true.

Among the many harrowing things said about race, none strikes the heart more powerfully than Eady's poems.