WHERE FICTION AND POETRY ARE KIN, MIGHTY MAGIC IS POSSIBLE

Author: By Ann Harleman

Date: SUNDAY, March 22, 1998

Page: G4

Section: Books

When I lived in the Soviet Union, in the late 1970s, poetry was often not only on the minds but also on the lips of my Russian friends; poetry was so important that you could -- and many did -- go to prison for writing it. In Siberia the young Irina Ratushinskaya wrote her poems on bars of soap, so that the acquaintances leaving for the West could smuggle them out by memorizing them, then washing the ``evidence'' away. Something similar, it seems to me, occurs in the fiction of writers who are also poets. Grace Paley's ``Collected Stories'' (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $12, paper) abounds with voices that would be at home in any poem. ``His teeth fell out, his hair disappeared, he got smaller, shriveled up little by little, till goodbye and good luck he was gone,'' says one narrator of her mother's husband. Of her own solitary life she says: ``This was my independence . . . blooming but it didn't have no roots and its face was paper.'' Another character recalls ``a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart.'' Somehow poetry has melted into these blunt, believable, streetwise voices, to be smuggled past the cerebral cortex direct to the limbic brain.

The fiction of those who write poetry holds a pure joy in language that pumps away inside the narrative -- an invitation to take pleasure in language for itself alone. There is nothing humbly serviceable about Paley's language; her stories gleam with words that you rejoice to encounter. Things canter, glint, buzz, seep, dwindle; knees gallivant, crinolines crack, heads ring with ``the bells of childhood.'' Like Paley, David Malouf hears the way a poet hears, embracing both sound and silence, but with a different result. ``Remembering Babylon'' (Vintage, $11, paper) is full of a subtle continuous music, built into the structure of his sentences, unnoticeable until you put your ear to one. ``That in the middle of the night his wife and daughter should be standing out under big clouds at the edge of the dark, hanging together and watching him drag a helpless creature, half out of his wits, back from a moment of senseless bullying, while the men who had done it -- neighbors! -- were creeping home to crawl in beside their own wives, safe in bed.''

There is something primitive about all this, which I like to see as phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny. We are poets before we are storytellers. My grandson, at 2 1/2, has recently discovered metaphor. Last Saturday -- when everything, it seemed, evoked something else -- he took a sip from his green plastic cup and said, ``This water tastes like brown.'' (His mother, at almost the same age, looked up at the night sky over Moscow and pointed out the moon ``like a toenail in the sky.'')

Those of us who've lost the knack, or had it educated out of us, can turn to the fiction of Charles Baxter for images that surprise and delight. In ``Believers'' (Pantheon, $23) we find a man whose breath smells of ``gin and graham crackers''; another whose voice is ``clear as a shiny knife''; stars ``blindly racing some sickening stellar soapbox derby, right to left, right to left.'' A woman near the end of her pregnancy wakes to find that ``the moonlight on the sheets is as heavy as damp cotton. . . . She feels like a human rain forest: hot, choked with life, reeking with reproduction.'' The poet in Baxter can approach reality from unexpected angles, can ``tell it slant''; ordinary lives become immeasurably richer, and we find again the lost mystery, the otherness, of the world.

Which brings me to the concrete. If Flaubert was right, and God lives in the details, then the buried poetry in the fiction of those who write both endows it with the holy wonder children bring to the everyday. Sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch spangle the fiction of David Huddle. ``Intimates'' (Godine, $20.95) gives us ``sheets . . . that cool temperature that makes you curl up and shiver and think about how warm you're soon going to be.'' It offers the memorable Lucille, whose ``cinnamon-colored hair grew vigorously away from her head like some extraordinary bird's plumage'' and whose ``skin smelled like a field of clover on a hot afternoon.'' It conjures up a rabbit's ``spongy-sounding little grunts and squeaks'' and, ``when he sits in the sunlight . . . the veins through the skin of his ears.'' Malouf summons the sense to embody, literally, the turning points in his characters' lives. In ``Remembering Babylon,'' Janet, who has just gotten her first period, comes to tend the hives and finds that the bees react to her in a new way: ``Before she could complete the breath she had taken, or expel it in a cry, the swarm was on her, thickening so fast about her that it was as if night had fallen, just like that, in a single cloud. She just had time to see her hands covered with plushy, alive fur gloves before her whole body crusted over and she was blazingly gathered into the single sound they made, the single mind.''

``It is difficult to get the news from poems,'' said William Carlos Williams, ``yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.'' Can stories suffer a similar fate? Maybe not. But the presence of poetry, however subterranean, can make them live like nothing else can.