Poetry. African American Studies. African-American and a native of the South, poet Carl Martin's literal and figurative "Brit vernacular" asks of its reader nothing less than a total ignorance of expectation. These poems, coming after a long silence--Martin's first book, the acclaimed "Go Your Stations, Girl," appeared in 1991, and his second, "Genii Over Salzburg," in 1998--engage Romantic tropes such as Vision, Beauty, and the Self cheek-by-jowl with a Pop madness and a Modern despair, all in a high cadence that is winkingly isolate, stunningly productive. Martin's allusions and affinities are to and with Olympians of aesthetic conduct: Tolstoy, Maxfield Parrish, Jean Genet, Maeterlinck, Kate Moss, Peter Pan, the Green Man. "That's a sprinkle of rice in the air, a small fountain/ ingrained in the brain. Some glee in a philosophy/ of interference between world and self. Objects/ Flee, bolting and coursing in the wide green field." These lines are marbled through with the Real, and buffed by an apprehension so alert to Unreality as to be downright illuminating. Carl Martin is a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he lives and writes today.

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