Bart Edelman, The Last Mojito (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2005). Paperbound, 85 pp., $13.95.

Bart Edelman's The Last Mojito is a book of people and places-some famous, some down on their luck--who celebrate the little things of life, such as the drink whose ingredients order the book's chapters, the mojito, consisting of mint, sugar, lime, rum, ice, and club soda.

The title poem features four notable characters--two famous and one larger than life. We get Lou Diamond Phillips, Daniel Day-Lewis, the reverend Father Chris, and the narrator all at a bar, talking it up, trading their sob stories, until, in a characteristic moment, the poem's narrator and Father Chris order a round of mojitos; however, there are not enough drinks for everyone. They've run out of mint, so Lou and Dan "stare each other down,/Their fingers tightly gripping the table," followed by the club's piped in sound of La Bamba, including a "rumble of drums in the dark." Here, how the action plays out is as important as what happens, the fingers gripping the table, the stares shared between the four. Things happen, and we watch them play out dramatically, gloriously, even ignoblely, starting in this meeting with Phillips and Day-Lewis, who greet each other with a "high-five."

In "Had You Not," Edelman makes a characteristic nod to a literary figure, here the title character from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in a whimsical way, never spiraling into the erudite. Edelman writes, "Had you not hinted/It would be appropriate/For me to kiss you/Beneath the silver moon,/I may have avoided you/And Prufrocked myself through life--/Singing nothing but an etherized song." The nod to the Eliot poem, which includes the famous prelude of love being like intoxicating ether, rings true and is a nice compliment to the feeling and tone of the piece: "Let us go, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table." Here, with or without knowledge of the reference, we are transported into the romantic, dreamy mood of the piece. Also, Edelman coins the term "Prufrocked," which holds a beautiful, bilabial, stop-and-go tone.

"The Professor of Floors" introduces another remarkable character who takes off his shoes before walking into the great lecture hall "where*.the well-heeled academic,/Paces each day, searching," among the "living dead." A janitor, a floor-man, waits for his opening to speak, but the hour "grows late" and he, regrettably, never gives his own speech.

Edelman's The Last Mojito is told in a calm, reassuring, one-of-us tone, and it is peopled with everyday people, larger-than-life people, and famous people--people we get to know through this patient, compassionate book of verse.

--Kevin Rabas (Flint Hills Review)