Judson Mitcham. This April Day. Tallahasse, FL: Anhinga Press, 2003. 68 pp.

Poetry lovers whose sensibilities have been cluttered with confetti from all those multicultural poetic celebrations, and readers starved on the thin gruel of MFA pap where every neural nuance, every dysmenorrheic moment becomes a skinny poem, will want to order many copies of Judson Mitcham’s strongly beautiful This April Day.

Someone once said that all poetry is about sex and death, and since sex is about death, all poetry is about death. There would be no argument here, as most poems in this fine volume are about human decline and dying. Some years back a young woman in the audience at one of Jud’s readings asked him why so many of his poems are about death. His memorable answer was, “Because I’m going to die, and people I have loved have died and will die, and that bothers me!” This book is a further exploration of his concern.

This April Day’s title is taken from Mitcham’s elegy “In Memory of Adrienne Bond” written on the death a Georgia poet and poetic spirit (1933-1996), a member of the English faculty at Mercer University. There is a piece for “The Funerals of Strangers,” an “Elegy for a Young Poet,” many poems on the death of Mitcham’s father, and the ironically titled final item, the compelling “An Introduction” that introduces readers to a dying old “mother” whose “greasy White/wild short hair” and arms with “plum-colored bruises” “will shock/ anyone from home.”

The ars poetica, “Preface to an Omnibus Review,” wittily counsels aspiring poets to “Commit no… homages to anyone,” yet almost all the poems in this volume are homages to someone or something. “Preface” states that one should write no “asleep-in-the-deer-stand, waking-to-an-eight-point-buck-only-thirty-yards-away kind of poetry,” yet the strongly masculine persona in Mitcham’s poems stands in direct line of succession from the “wild- king-of-forever” work of James Dickey, that most “deer-stand” of American poets. Finally the poem advises poets to “include… no dogs,” while the very next poem is an elegy to the “deaf and blind” dog Cleopatra, and explores “why a man might cry for his dog/ harder than he did for his father.”

Shakespeare, in his Sonnet 55 boasts that his “powerful rhyme” shall outlive the marble [and] the gilded monuments of princes, bearing “The living record of [his love’s] memory” “Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity.” Eliot cautions us that “April is the cruelest month,” and as the temples of our bodies fall down around us, lilacs mock us with their renewal out of the dead land. The poet uses the tension between decay of the individual and the renewal of the species to create, in “The Wasteland” one of the important artistic monuments of our era. Tombstone artist W. O. Wolfe gave his son, Thomas, the homeward-looking angel, the controlling hieroglyphic for the younger Wolf’s famous account of life in Asheville, NC. And ten thousand deaths and darknesses have engendered in our American culture the Blues, its only native art form. Passing has given us so much permanence.

If you are among those who are going to die, who have lost loved ones, or will lose them, this volume is an important ars moriendi. Its sensitive strength is an antidote to the trivial work of so many Postmodern writers who seem to have forgotten that most important fact of life—that the life eventually goes away, but lives are always here—confused, lost, and always in need of the poet’s strong hand.