Howard Hampton's cultural critiques and new poems by Lillias Bever

By Kirk Robertson

Howard Hampton's "Born In Flames" (Harvard) is pop culture criticism at its pointed best. The subtitle - termite dreams, dialectical fairy tales and pop apocalypses - hints at some of his concerns about the disruptive powers of art.

This survey of his 20-year obsession with assaying the simmering surfaces and translucent depths of pop zeitgeists is impressive in its scope, even more so in its juxtapositions: "Natural Born Killers" vs. "Forrest Gump;" the Mekons vs. Frederic Jameson's postmodernism; a sidebar on Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska;" D.H. Lawrence vs. Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Jean Luc Godard vs. Steven Spielberg.

But, it's his rabid, rapid prose that makes the case, connecting dots real and imagined, reaching out and hooking onto, drawing into the vortices, things both anticipated and not.

He's fascinated by the allure of extremity, by the collision of modernism's drive to make it new with pop culture's primal instincts, a dialectic that, in his lexicon, breaks down barriers of taste, virtuousness and illusions of hoped-for sanity in all directions simultaneously, leaving us with just the stark shadows of Barbara Stanwyck and Seijun Suzuki on a red-brick neon wall.

"Bellini in Istanbul" (Tupelo Press) by Lillias Bever is a collection of poems that combines an assaying of Bellini's being hired as court painter for Mehmet in 1479, notions of Cesarean delivery and archaeological excavation, with memoirs of a love affair between a visiting American and a Turk.

The poems spin a web of overlapping allusions. There are gift horses from Troy, an excavation of a desk drawer, wondering whether artifacts guide or protect us.

Objects in the museums begin to speak and she makes speculative assertions about what happens during decapitation, how Bellini undressed the Madonna to make things a little more erotic for the sultan.

The metaphors take on personal resonance in evocations of the cultural clash in contemporary Istanbul, her doomed romance across the straits that separate us, and meditations on the presence of blue in everything: evil eyes, the breath of possibility, how memory becomes mnemonic.