A new collection of poems by Andrew Glaze is a joyous event, indeed! Remembering Thunder, his first collection since Someone Will Go on Owing:  Selected Poems 1966-1992, glows with the wit and spontaneity that have always empowered his work. But these new poems seem to be even more concise, more fully realized, edgier than ever before, aptly befitting the psychic tenor of our post-9/11 world.

The opening poem, "Prometheus Who?" establishes the tone and direction of the book, presenting the voice of the poet as Hero, neither God nor man—someone who is "brains with wings," capable of flying throughout the "vast extremity" of earthly pain and seeing it for what it is-a complex tragedy of sociopolitical and environmental disasters over which, try as we might, we cannot exert useful control:   "We ask and ask, why laid on us the world's madnesses—?" And "What can we do to make it right? Christ woe!"

The power of flight, how it enables us to look down on our world and see it in instructive new perspective, is a recurring theme in the book. In "A Little Han Horse," a charming figurine of a horse flies high above the gruesome chaos down on earth, and also "as part of it,/ through, between, beneath"—and in so doing, gains valuable knowledge. Yet, he always retains the ability to escape, via the power of flight—which translates into the power of freedom, the ultimate source of rapture: "hooves flickering sparks, nostrils flaring,/ his heart knows it all./ He skips a little dance of joy."

But Glaze reminds us that such heavenly freedom is still very much an unrealized dream—a dream he boldly articulates in "Admiring the Rain":

We'd corner freedom, somehow,
make it what it said it was,—palaces, sunfish,
secrets, deer paths, pine-woods,
fucking turned to love and prophecy.

Tackling serious worldly problems head-on, Glaze sometimes feels hopeless, and retreats. In "On Being Elsewhere," he admits that "I don't march any more,/ I live by a sort of letter box at the porch of things." But his retreat is short-lived, and once again Glaze takes off into the vast, lively skies of his imagination.

In the title poem, "Remembering Thunder," we meet Glaze's delightfully kooky "Daddy," who has the fantastical capacity to make thunderstorms occur at will: "Daddy, waving his malacca stick,/ taps the fieldstone scarp of the porch"—and at once "cloud armies/jam and collide like a violent opera afternoon." Then: " 'Comes thunder!,' shouts Daddy, banging his stick,/ like a mad conductor." The thunder that occurs is doubtless the loud, insistent voice of passion—the poet's voice, the poem's voice—Glaze's voice; a voice so potent that Daddy begs the powers-that-be to forgive the thunder (or its source):  " 'Because he's doing it/ not a minute about any money,/ but only for the fun!' "

If Glaze's thunder is symbolic of the fiery passion that drives artists to persist at their work, then "Remembering Thunder" is remembering where that fire came from—the magical time capsule of childhood; and this book honors the myriad ways creative passion has manifested itself throughout his life. For Glaze has never lost the fire that lit his youthful imagination. He continues to sit firmly in the artistic pilot's seat with dead-accurate imagery, fine music, and shrewd narrative conceptualizations. In "Spelios," he demonstrates how we might enter the underworld:

To enter such a place, a cave,
you lie upon your back like being born,
and push against the rock of the strangulated roof
feeling your way below and endlessly down.

Often, he word-paints the vivid skyscapes he seems to know so well. In "One Day Summer," the skies appear "in sheets,/ grey blankets, pillows, the rumpled bed of wind." In "A Fall Gallop," the wind

whips off its shirt,
swipes at the ladder-back clouds,
overturns a whole field trespassing west.

In "Day," he opens the night sky for us at day's end with:

the Milky Way,
spreading its vast comforter,
sprinkling millions of tacks
that fall like stars
and sleep on the roof of your house.

In "Central Park South," he deftly uses skyline imagery to poke bitter fun at the wealthy:

The sun is moving like an electric yacht
across the smart blue combers of the buildings
splendid in the whitecaps of their rents.

Toward the close of the book, the poems become more personal, subtly alluding to events in Glaze's life. At last, we see that the four years he served in the Air Force during World War II inform much of his work, and not only via crisp images of sky and flight. In "Horace," Glaze identifies with the great Roman lyric poet who was sent to war following the assassination of Caesar, but who fled the battlefield with others, discarding his shield. Despite his defection, Horace could never completely escape the horrors of war, and the trauma of his wartime experience had profound influence on his lifelong devotion to poetry. In the poem's delightfully anachronistic closure, Glaze clearly desires that his work have positive impact on our ailing world.

The war went on even as now, in the human heart.
and he saw the poet's job
was to hate the hatefulness—

like Walt, to nurse the hurt, and reconcile—.
Like Emily—toughest of all,
to hide in the country with no sign of a shield
and testify to the glory in the soul.

In "Truth Beneath Truth," he yearns "to birth the world/ into life out of words, and to reach among them like a clutch/ of fingerlings, seething with joy, to make a sort of dance of use." And in "Witch Broom," he vows to "move every day through myths/ that crack like a door/ in the wakeful dream of a child."

The title of the closing poem, "Prop Wash," suggests that, for now, the plane we've been riding in throughout this lively book is safely back on the ground, being washed and inspected. But what is really being inspected in this poem are some of the major events of Glaze's life—and the poem is printed in italics to suggest the presence of a voice set apart from all others in the book. The closing stanza locates him in the present:

Somewhere high, nose set at the limit,
in my most secret moments,
I gasp and I cough at an uttermost ceiling
till my wings tumble over,
and down I come skirring like the bellow of thunder,
firing wild bursts at forever, singing.

And that, finally, is precisely what Andrew Glaze has been doing throughout the vibrant, unforgettable pages of Remembering Thunder.

(Reprinted with permission from Home Planet News.)