February 22, 2002 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

eveningsout

Poetic license

Three new collections illustrate the pain and joy of living in the age of AIDS

Harmless Medicine

by Justin Chin

Manic D Press, $13.95 paperback

Landscape with Human Figure by Rafael Campo

Duke University, $15.95 paperback

Divining

by Pauletta Hansel

Woven Word, $12 trade paperback

Reviewed by Anthony Glassman

Poetry is an important medium of expression, perhaps because of the rawness of the form in expressing the emotions of the poet, or maybe for the increased effort of reading verse instead of prose. Stripping away the trappings of traditional narrative, flowing along the stream of consciousness, the observer is swept into the writer's perceptions, a moving experience, especially when the poet is skilled and intelligent.

Justin Chin's work, for example, is a deft and intricate blend of humor at times selfeffacing, other times directed sharply outward anger, angst, melancholy and hope.

Chin himself doesn't see anger in his work. "Really? It's angry? I really don't think it's angry at all," he speculated. "Maybe maudlin. I would say it's kind of funny myself. But that's just me."

It could be a case of the reader seeing in

the art what he or she brings to it. He is right that it is funny, though. Pieces like "Contents Page to the Book of Poems I Have Yet to Write," for instance, is sublime in its absurdity, and "Surrealist Bookmark" manages to top "Contents Page."

His work continues to mature with each successive collection, while other writers find themselves smack dab in the midst of maturity.

Rafael Campo, for instance, is an odd mix. He is a physician, practicing internal medicine in Boston. He is a gay man. He is a poet.

His book doesn't contain odes to organs. or philosophical díscourses on gastrointestinal parasites, but he does plumb the depths of the human heart and examines in close detail the ailment called love, if that is not too saccharine a metaphor.

There is a greater melancholy in Campo's work than in Chin's. Perhaps it is the different way in which each of the two has interacted with death. Campo's professional relationship with the Grim Reaper may have produced a deeper sentimentality, while Chin, being the angry, er, maudlin young punk rocker that he is, looks differently at the world around him.

Dealing with death, though, is something that Pauletta Hansel chose to do. When friends die, the duty to stay with them in their final hours and help heal the survivors is a voluntary one, an obligation that can be set aside, although at the risk of peers considering the deserter a coward.

HARMLESS MEDICINE

JUSTIN CH

Hansel, a Cincinnatian of Appalachian descent who is an activist on many fronts, deals with the death of her friend Terry Flanigan in the third section of Divining:

"For awhile after he died a year maybe more.

in my dreams

nothing could stay dead,” she writes in "Where the Dead Go." Unfortunately, Terry is still dead, unlike in those early dreams. It was the

Rafael Campo

landscape with human figure

experience of watching a friend die and nursing his partner through the period of mourning that began Hansel on her path of redemption, that led her to writing. Of the three, her emotions are probably the most in the forefront, her heart on her sleeve.

The trio have all been touched by AIDS, been brushed by death, and taken up pen and paper to fight back in the best way they know how.

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