OneOnOne. Jack Myers. Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 1999.

hen a poem is at its finest, it shares many of the qualities of the best of sacred scripture. It's simple. It's true. The symbols concrete, caught in time and place, yet universal.

Thus it is with Jack Myers' new book of poetry, OneOnOne, the latest in a long line of distinguished collections. His book, As Long As You're Happy, won the National Poetry Series award.

Concerning his craftsmanship, The New York Times says of Myers' poetry that his "main strength is providing order and clarity for powerful emotions through a deceptively plain-speaking style."

Concerning Myers' themes, Seamus Heaney, the Irish Nobel Prize winning poet, once said of Myers' poems that they "take us to a place beyond their irony and salutary laughter where we can once again trust in sanity, tenderness, tolerance, freedom, art, and love." And I would add that we can also trust our essentially spiritual experiences, even when those experiences seem to be more about longing and confusion than finding and satisfaction.

To read Myers is to take a spiritual journey into darkness. This spiritual journey is not caught in a specific tradition like the Protestantism of William Blake or the Catholicism of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rather, Myers' journey is that of the 20th century wanderer. But don't call him existential or perhaps post-modern--Myers can't be so easily dismissed.

In the course of just the first few pages of his new book, he goes from Judaism to ancient Greek philosophy to Buddhism. These are hungry poems. Their hunger speaks not to answers but to process, seeking, longing. Along that journey, the reader follows Myers' through a consuming struggle with unresolved childhood issues, brooding sexual desire, loneliness, angst, as well as joy and surprise and insight and delight. In short, the stuff of a very modern life.

The speaker in these poems is constantly wounded and wounded again, constantly seeking triage but never quite healing before the struggle is resumed. For example, take these lines from the last poem in the collection, the eponymous "OneOnOne".

A cardiologist I shoot pool with,
systematic, cool, who beats me
every time, said, "You don't have a
defensive bone in your body, do you?
You'd rather have fun than win."
And though I felt flattered, I left
devastated by his wealth: Cuban cigars,
a glass house perched on a cliff in the heart
of the city, which took me forever to find.

The speaker, after leaving the physician's home, is torn by indecision. Should he go home alone or try to pick-up a woman in a bar? Why are these the options? Because his motto is "I draw the line at emptiness". And if he did pick-up the woman?

[S]he'd eventually be like me and we'd be miserable and then break up.
So the question is why do I feel the need for anyone? Why can't I live
alone and just be happy without all the trying that gets built up
like ice on the wings? Was that my original question?

But the voice of Myers' poetry is no helpless schmuck reveling in his defenselessness. This is an active seeker, a man of great insight who has "mastered waiting". He is also a person who, while not quite the master of his environment, is the keenest observer of himself in it.

When I mastered waiting,
I loved being alone
inside the waiting
and the waiting
inside being alone.

There are those who would say these poems are devastating moments in an otherwise empty life. Perhaps. But this speaker is the owner of these moments, a person in full possession of his life. And, most importantly, in full possession of his longing, his search. For it is in this longing, this search, indeed in this meaninglessness that Myers finds his keenest expression. Myers looks straight at the loneliness, straight at the emptiness, and stares it down. And why is that important? Because most people can't even admit that they even have such feelings, much less talk about them.

Thus does Myers' spiritual quest begin where all spiritual quests begin, with what the poet St. John Of The Cross calls "the dark night of the soul". The speaker of these poems is one who questions much and believes nothing. He journeys through memories, places, traditions and bars, until--until nothing.

For unlike John Of The Cross, there is no leap of faith here. There is only the journey. A journey on which both wanderer and reader are deeply enriched.

John Samuel Tieman is a teacher, poet, essayist and historian from St. Louis. His collection of poems, Morning Prayers, and Toward One Voice: A Triptych in Co-Authoring, an essay he wrote with his wife, Phoebe Ann Cirio, previously appeared in TPQ OnLine.

OneOnOne by Jack Myers is available from Autumn House Press, 219 Bigham Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15211-1431; 412-381-0217; simms@duq.edu