05/07/2000

By Tom Mayo / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

First Loves
By Carmela Ciuraru
(Scribner, $22)

First Loves is a collection of poems and comments from 68 practicing poets who responded when editor Carmela Ciuraru asked them to write about the poem that first inspired them. An astonishing number of formalists, experimentalists of every stripe, Old Guard and New Guard picked up on this seemingly innocent inquiry, and the result is a captivating collection that delivers a surprise or other pleasure on every page.

Most of the poets accepted their assignment and discussed the very first poem that suggested that their lives would be about poetry. Others started their essays in conformity to the task at hand, then shifted to the poet whose work most influenced them from an early age or made the most lasting impression - but no matter. All probably agreed with John Hollander, whose essay ends: "To be a poet means, among other things, to know that the question is meaningless and that, in the interest of some kind of courtesy, it can be answered only with a lie or through some secret and radical rewriting of the question."

Mr. Hollander's gambit may explain why this book escapes two obvious pitfalls. First, readers might not particularly care what poem first captivated 6-year-old Joyce Carol Oates or entranced toddler Donald Hall. Or a collection of poems that appealed to even preternaturally talented prepubescent poets might be precious to a fault or could easily miss the poems that would appeal to an older crowd (book buyers, for instance). First Loves falls into neither trap.

This is an anthology like no other that comes to mind. Juvenal, Blake and Shakespeare coexist peacefully alongside the lyrics of Leonard Cohen ("Suzanne," courtesy of E. Ethelbert Miller) and Lorenz Hart (Eleanor Wilner's choice, "The Lady Is a Tramp"). And the random arrangement of the poems re-creates within the covers of the book the way we actually encounter poems, not usually arranged by epoch or style, but accidentally and without preconception.

As a slender anthology of crazily ordered poems, though, this book would be admittedly slim pickings. The true pleasure lies in the accompanying essays. Here we are given Carol Moldaw's tips for reading e.e. cummings; a celebration of the dactyls of Seamus Heaney's youth; and an opportunity to find the connection between Bishop Donne and that supreme ironist Billy Collins.

This is a book for everyone: for the brother-in-law who doesn't "get" poetry, for the parent just now showing an interest or for the son or daughter starting to write the stuff. Everyone will find a lot to love.

Tom Mayo, poetry-lover and associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.