If Malcolm Ross-MacDonald had armed the heroine of The Big Waves with poetry instead of the tendency to internalize experience as a means of living and surviving in a world of moody, macho father figures, artists, and lovers, then his Milena Lang might have come out swinging with something not unlike Call It Blue, Judi Benson's most recent full-length collection. Not that Benson is a closet neo-confessionalist she's not. There's more of Caitlin Thomas than Sylvia Plath about this American expatriate who only recently became a citizen of the UK where she has lived with her husband, poet Ken Smith, since 1978. Hers has been a jack-of-all-trades existence: PR director of a symphony orchestra, Assistant Director of Antioch University's London program, amateur actress, barmaid, youth worker, volunteer bereavement counselor and commissioned artist-all occupations which have contributed to her poetic arsenal.

Benson is the author of two previous books Somewhere Else (Turret Books, 1990) and In the Pockets of Strangers (Rockingham, 1993). In addition to once editing Foolscap magazine, she has edited What Poets Eat: A Collection of Food Related
Poems and Recipes (Foolscap, 1994); and has co-edited (with Smith) Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia (Bloodaxe, 1993) and (with Agneta Falk) The Long Pale Corridor: Contemporary Poems of Bereavement (Bloodaxe, 1996). In Call It Blue-dedicated to Smith, her "dancing and sparring partner"-she writes with a daughter's emotion, a mother's patience, and a cynic's swaggering wit about growing up in and then away from her Navy brat origins.

The book opens with the haunting "Time Sonnet," a fourteen-line, fourteen-word affair somewhat reminiscent of Brad Leithauser's monosyllabic experiments with the classic form. However, "Time Sonnet" is much more convincing than Leithauser's precious "Post-Coitum Tristesse," but then Benson is in no way a New Formalist. Rather, she is a realist living in, of, and for the moment. She is much too distrustful of form, tradition, the rigid, immutable nature of the past. "History," she writes in "Escaping Backwards," "has a way of putting us in the yellow print, / a long spin of statistics-occupation, location, next of kin." Language and poetry, though they have a way of collaborating with the past, should ultimately serve as the tool one uses to break free from it. "Time Sonnet," is her line in the sand, her declaration of independence from the burden of history: "There's / only / this / moment / which / even / as / we / speak / becomes / something / we /once / said."

Yet investigate the past she does, albeit with the intention of putting it behind her. This is not to suggest that Benson is not at all ambivalent about her break with history-she is. In "The Inheritance" she writes "You'll never stop this yearning in me. / It's my legacy, people I come from, / torn between land and sea, go and stay." But it is the "yearning" that drives her over the next wave, and she comforts herself with new experiences and by absorbing each into herself. Whether the breakers take her into the alcoholic doldrums of "the One too Many Club" or into the stormy latitudes of domestic unrest, she meets them head-on and with a profound sense of humor. When she watches her mate become possessed by his own tumultuous family history, set off by something as mundane as the home improvement project he undertakes in "Conversion," she minces no words. He becomes "the mad man shouting / all night long, hacking the wall down, / his father's tools, his father's anger, / homewrecker, tearing at the heart of the house."

The past is never far away, she implies, as long as there is a father to recall. The figure of her own father, the long-dead Captain "Rags" Parish, stalks through the book like a disapproving Captain Bligh pacing the deck abuzz with talk of mutiny. Mutinous daughter Benson may have been (and be), and yet there is love lost, clearly expressed, in her words. Her father is the absent "kite" that once gave order to the family's "so many bits of string." There's not a "Meinkampf look" to be found in Call It Blue, just the bittersweet tang of moments lived, remembered, and then cut loose. Because, as Judi Benson will tell you "what melts in your mouth is letting go."