For a book whose advertised theme is ballroom dancing, American Smooth is remarkably unprecious. Dove coolly compares handgun brands (I'm not kidding—"Glocks are lightweight but sensitive; / the Keltec has a long pull and a kick") and, in a good section about African-American troops enlisted with the French in World War I,

"A soldier waits until he's called—then
moves ass and balls up, over
tearing twigs and crushed faces,
swinging his bayonet like a pitchfork
and thinking anything's better
than a trench, ratshit
and the tender hairs of chickweed. . . ."

ALFONZO PREPARES TO

GO OVER THE TOP

Dove isn't aces at voice—she never nails soldier-talk the way, say, Wilfred Owen does in "The Chances"—but she's game. American Smooth is largely a return to form after 1999's slack On the Bus with Rosa Parks and 1995's Mother Love, in which Dove played fast and loose with a tight form (the sonnet) which she hadn't really mastered. Her chronic weaknesses have been a thick emotional carapace and a tendency to overexplication, which combine to sometimes give her an offputting, blithe invulnerability (a poem about Paris in Mother Love contains the line, "There was love, of course"). Her travel and love poems often expend energy trying to convince you that they haven't abandoned themselves to the thing that occasioned them in the first place. In this collection she lets these tendencies give us a dose of unloveliness, and if you thought you were in for a pleasant evening of waltzing, you'll get some of that, but you probably didn't expect to hear her call the activity "that European constipated / swoon."

"American Smooth" (as distinct from "International Standard") refers to a form of ballroom dancing in which the partners may separate and dance without physical contact, permitting, as Dove puts it, "improvisation and individual expression." Ironically, where I have the most trouble with American Smooth is in the places where it most indulges in American Smooth: the fillips, flourishes, and filigrees of Dove's descriptive writing seem less interesting than her basic steps. Ezra Pound warned against the mixture of the abstract and the concrete in expressions like "dim lands of peace"; Dove's writing isn't usually that egregious, but she does tend to pull you in directions of greater and lesser concretion at the same time: "swift and serene / magnificence," "depths of history's wrath," "pierced, burst, suppurating / anguish," "a tonic of absence," "singed by adversity," "darkening / ring // of neglect." In the end, though, my keenest wish for American Smooth is that it had withheld the source of its section epigraphs (which I can't bring myself to give away here)— Dove missed a chance to play one of the all-time top-ten pranks on po-biz. Don't go to the book expecting subtlety, but it provides a lively alternative, if you want one, to the European constipated swoon.

— D. H. Tracy