ELEGY FOR THE SOUTHERN DRAWL By Rodney Jones Houghton Mifflin and Co. $20, 102 pp.

Y'all come back now, you hear? I expected to read, my soul as a Southern Virginian recently lost somewhere in New England and enthusiastic to give due mourning to the loss of its native tongue.

But while my heart was set on an epic glorification of the graceful lilt of my once much stronger southern accent, Rodney Jones offered instead a peek into a world of universal local color. His poetry collection Elegy for the Southern Drawl draws on traditional themes of family, nature and religion, but grows throughout the collection to explore more obscure angles of the human experience. While Jones' poems initially evoke responses of tranquility and ease, by the end of Elegy the reader grown where Jones (NOT READABLE) lament.

Jones' poetic voice fosters a direct, engaging relationship with his reader, a relationship that is open and honest and that allows the reader to feel both trusted and trusting.

An apparently unified speaker appears throughout most of the collection and especially in the first two sections. A middle-class, alcoholic family man, the speaker wrestles with questions of aging and change and intently reflects on the past and on the reality of pain and life. And with Jones' language, the reader follows the collection like a story.

That the tone and diction of Elegy have an almost prosaic feel is not an insult to (NOT READABLE) Thus, Jones' long lines and frequent enjambment aid his devotion to his text and to his images. Well-crafted, careful expressions then carry the rhythm and pulse of the pieces and allow the poems to remain true and real.

The title poem "Elegy for the Southern Drawl," placed strategically in the book's middle, is welcomingly sprinkled with the sounds of "yes'm," "no'm" and "hidey" as Jones transports his reader temporarily to the forklift, the Shoney's or the Appalachian foothills. But it is not all a happy remembrance. At several points, the speaker reveals his embarrassment, that "until fourth grade, [he] spoke rarely."

Juxtaposed with the speaker's explanation (NOT READABLE) Labyrinth, and later he refers directly to Virgil and Homer. Relaying a dialogue in which a simple man assumes El Salvador is somewhere in Southern Alabama, the speaker--in contrast--demonstrates his own learning. "When Mongols conquered the Chinese..." he begins the eleventh stanza, immediately before which he describes a voice as "the London cockney of a Lebanese immigrant." Thus, the speaker in the elegy is separated.

Jones draws connections throughout the collection to images in "Elegy," referring, for example, to the church language of "thous" and "thines." Within the "Elegy" are two amusing anecdotes of family euphemisms for persons' (NOT READABLE) of the collection, Jones presents a poem entitled "Sacrament for My Penis." Obviously no longer holding the reserve of his past, the speaker and Jones have voyaged to another side. The language, its accent and its vocabulary, have died, and Jones demonstrates in his last section his own personal growth from his southern drawl.