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_____p o e t r y special VIRIDIAN BY PAUL HOOVER UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS 104 PAGES THE BOUNTY BY DEREK WALCOTT FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX 112 PAGES BY ALBERT MOBILIO viridian Several years ago, poet, novelist and editor Paul Hoover published a book-length poem called "The Novel," a funny, mordant view of the job of authorship, and it went completely under-noticed. His latest effort, "Viridian," is a collection of vigorously mindful poems that demonstrates how Big Ideas about Language and History can be poked at with wit and pop-culture savvy. In a section titled "Night of the Hunter," for example, Hoover riffs on the Robert Mitchum film of that title, while capsulizing 200 years of German philosophy as a vaudeville treat: According to the theory, Madonna erased Madonna Ciccone; white men erased the Cherokee nation; Serbs erase Muslims; black men erase black men; and guns erase everyone else as night erases day. Everything is erased including the trace of history, which, like a cartoon dog, draws the trail with his nose but erases it with its tail. These are not poems marked by technical feats; both the form and voice are straightforward, if not sometimes prosaic. And Hoover maintains this finely tuned meditative tone even when jumbling the facts: It's time for the green field to go on a televised tour, time for the old economies to be displaced by mirrors, and time for rain to announce the new global rules. The beguiling images here -- just how is an economy displaced by mirrors? -- emerge in clean, memorable relief from the surrounding equanimity. A poet for those of us who appreciate the legerdemain in paring dusty tomes down to cryptic crib sheets, Hoover is a reader's magic reader. the bounty Derek Walcott is generally called a lyrical poet, and surely he is. His plushly turned evocations of Caribbean flora and fauna make vivid panoramas, or conveniently sized postcards: The mango trees serenely rust when they are in flower, nobody knows the name for that voluble cedar whose bell-flowers fall, the pomme-arac purples its floor. Yet this lyric touch too often serves predictable feelings -- his work is elegiac and earnestly political -- that could withstand at least some small lashing of cynical wit. That was the Restoration's poetic marriage -- lovely lyric and bilious barb -- but Nobel Laureate Walcott seems too intent on giving good account of himself and his island home. Like several of its preceding volumes, "The Bounty" is a decent collection of well-meaning poems that lack both a necessary spark as well as a perverse, yet no less necessary, will to extinguish that spark. At bottom, amid the rich descriptions and biblical allusions, Walcott's poems high-mindedly aim to give voice to the collective unconscious of the race. "[W]e have no solace but utterance," he decrees in the book's title poem, an elegy for his mother, "hence this wild cry." This familiar, upbeat ideological program is sounded throughout the book, in which the notion that redemption and identity can be found in homeland and articulation goes unquestioned. Such easy epiphanies might pass muster if Walcott were not also so given to clichés: "Remember childhood? Remember a faraway rain? Yesterday I wrote a letter and tore it up." For those who already love Walcott's keen eye and graceful lilt, "The Bounty" provides the expected. next page : West Wind and Glare BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html