A singer-songwriter turns poet with ‘Blues’

The protagonist is a kid desperate to leave Tennessee; by the final verse, he finds himself right back where he started, drowning in an “abundance of inherited sadness.’’

In “Oh My Sweet Carolina,’’ a ballad recorded a decade ago, when Adams was in his early 20s, the problem isn’t getting out of town, but getting back home. “Up here in the city feels like things are closing in,’’ Adams sighs. “The sunset’s just my lightbulb burning out/ I miss Kentucky and I miss my family/ All the sweetest winds they blow across the South.’’

Adams is sometimes accused of being a little too saccharine, but back then, he didn’t lack a sense of humor - in both “Jacksonville Skyline’’ and “Oh My Sweet Carolina,’’ he simultaneously embodies and pokes fun at the old trope of the lovelorn cowboy crooner.

Now Adams is in his 30s, with some 15 years of recording behind him. The time has come, in other words, to put away childish things. It would be nice to report that “Infinity Blues’’ is a correspondingly serious effort - a reflection sharpened by all that time on tour.

But curiously, much of this collection feels forced in a way Adams’s songs rarely do. The poems are baggy and in most cases overlong; like a young aesthete at his first writer’s workshop, Adams confuses volume with depth, and wordiness with emotional resonance.

Unconstrained by technical considerations, like melody, or the length of a song, Adams simply throws everything onto the page, rarely allowing the free verse to coalesce into anything coherent. (The poem “I Refuse’’ begins, “I refuse to edit/ I am but a single life.’’ At the bottom of the page, Akashic publisher Johnny Temple notes that the “poem was originally 32 pages long.’’)

Too bad, because under all that noise, Adams’s work can be astonishingly evocative. Among the prettiest lines in “Infinity Blues’’ is the hushed final stanza of “Red,’’ a lover’s lament: “lids shut soft/ under a halo/ of curls and fire.’’

On “Soon It Will Be Time to Go,’’ Adams takes a simple scene of domesticity - a group of children leaving a party - and twists it into a parable. “And once the handle turns,’’ he writes, “the first ones go/ the dark street outside/ will suck us all dry.’’ A similar pall falls over the title poem, which scans in part: “i am broken like the lamp on the nightstand/ i am the ghost on/ the foot of the bed.’’

Adams clearly owes a great debt here to Charles Bukowski, the patron saint of the barfly and the world-weary tramp. In “For Charles,’’ Adams attempts to channel the late poet, with lines like “I bet God made you join a rollerskating league/ I bet you hate it.’’ It’s meant to be sincere, but like many of the works here, it feels at once grating and ludicrous, like a joke delivered at an inopportune moment.

Matthew Shaer writes about books for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.