Kevin Young's debut book of poetry, Most Way Home, earned him a National Poetry Series selection by Lucille Clifton in 1995 when he was just twenty-four. It now has been issued in paperback and should, one hopes, garner even more praise and attention for Young's metric. Not that Young is lacking in fans: last year Swing Magazine named him one of the "Thirty Most Powerful People in Their Twenties."

Most Way Home's migratory tone and structure recall the plight of the African American who, not unlike the Native American, is forced into a peripatetic existence. The movement in Most Way Home is from deep South to, in the final poem, "Letters from the North Star," a celestial height of contemplation. This meditative poem is the culmination of all the back-breaking slave-labour recounted with vivid exactness throughout the book: the narrator's father, a farmer, "returned/ pounds heavier/ from those thirsty fields/ he was even cooler/ losing each soaked/ woolen skin/ to the floor, dropping/ naked rain in his/ wife's earthen arms."

The rain-quest for the good of the land (in the lines above) is a subtheme which begins with a parched waste-land of farm: "rain that asks for/ more rain rain that can't help but/ answer what you are looking for/ must fall." This recurrent prayer for rain, however, is answered late in the book not by a rainstorm, but a blizzard: "my mind's stuttering storm-/ it slows, turns thunder then/ effortless, suffocating snow." Answered prayers bring calamity, while unanswered prayers (especially in part III, "Getting Religion") bring more reality, as the narrator remarks, "how you prayed that week/ your knees turning into/ the hard-backed pews of early/ service."

What is remarkable throughout Most Way Home is Young's control of line-and temper. What easily could have slipped into a screed, or worse, diatribe, becomes a highly refined and methodical treatment of reality and remembrance. In "The Works," for example, a crew of white swindlers try to buy an African-American's farmland to drill for oil:

Young's exact enjambments pull the eye and ear down with the interlinking lines which, when read aloud, recall the metrical precision of Williams, Zukofsky and Creeley.

The long poem entitled "The Spectacle" takes the reader into the marginalized lot of circus freaks that lend so much amusement to African Americans who, like "Able/ and Cane the Siamese/ Twins" or "The Escape Artist," are a liminalized group looking at themselves in an unfunny funhouse mirror. The circus scenes which remind one of album covers by Bob Dylan ("The Basement Tapes") and Tom Waites ("Swordfishtrombones") are a sort of fragmented statement, declaiming "like the spectacle/ they whipped me/ inside out.."

In 1996, Young traveled with a retrospective of Jean Basquiat's work, writing poems on museum walls to complement the late controversial artist's graphics. Basquiat, who lived in urban squalor until his "discovery" by Andy Warhol, is a spiritual father of sorts to Young, whose take on poverty-whether in the country or city-is concisely captured in the lines: "Bored, what was that?/ We were too busy being poor." Young's first book deserves all the praise it received and makes one anticipate the new work this twenty-seven-year-old has in store.