ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996                 TAG: 9604290136
SECTION: BOOKS                    PAGE: 4    EDITION: METRO 
                                             TYPE: BOOK REVIEW 
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY DAN GRIBBIN 

BOOKMARKS

THE MAN WHO WENT OUT FOR CIGARETTES. Poems by Adrian Blevins-Church. Bright Hill Press. Price not listed.

Adrian Blevins-Church offers, in the 15 poems in this chapbook, a glimpse into the perplexing world of modern womanhood. The speaker in "The Inheritance" ponders her fate as a woman destined to repeat her mother's walkout: "For years/it's been happening, this dull death/of her married heart." In "The Painter's Daughter," she wants to know exactly where she stands in relation to the people who have created her, have dreamed their dreams for her, people who are sadly vulnerable to her own expressions of freedom. She implies a great deal about the effects of the previous generation's sins in her final poem, "The Wilderness You Know Best."

Blevins-Church has a strong sense of metaphor, wisely avoiding forced and formulaic expression. Her situations and scenes are well enough articulated to draw us into the poems, though the imagery is seldom striking in itself. There is a certain tangency here that may be frustrating to some readers, holding us on the circumference of a circle the poet has not yet decided whether she wants us to enter. We witness the struggle of a heart trying to make sense of relationships that have borne odd fruit, roles that have lost shape in imperceptible temporal drift. It is a heart trying to cope with disappointment without giving in to a cynicism which would wring it dry.

Dan Gribbin teaches writing at Ferrum College and reviews films as the Ferrum Ferret in the Cinema POV corner on America Online.

Philomena Jurey, whose book "A Basement Seat to History," was reviewed on this page by George Kegley, will discuss her book at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, Monday at 11 a.m. She worked as a reporter at The Roanoke Times and spent 28 years with Voice of America where she was White House correspondent and editor in chief.

LENGTH: Short :   44 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  (headshot) Blevins-Church.