"Little Gifts That Just Happen"

By Michael Walsh

Some people think poetry is dead, but it's not; it's just underground, disguised as songwriting. Once, a reclusive Emily Dickinson could spin out her feathery verses and send them next door to her sister-in-law, content to preserve her New England obscurity. Today a would-be Dickinson is more likely to grab a guitar, put together a backup band and hit the road. That was precisely the path taken by Nanci Griffith, a wide-eyed Texas waif who may just be one of America's best poets -- and for sure is one of its best songwriters.

Her recordings are populated by such stylistically disparate collaborators as Lyle Lovett, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton of U2 and even the Chieftains. In the rigidly structured formats of FM radio, though, Griffith has never found a fit: Is she folk, country or what? Now, with the release this month of her 12th album, the magnificently tuneful and frankly autobiographical Flyer, Griffith's relative lack of celebrity is a bygone thing.

That she is not better known is partly by choice. "I'm an extremely reclusive person," says Griffith, 40, in a high, clear, Texas-twanged schoolgirl voice. "As far as career goes, I've probably shot myself in the foot more than anyone I know, because I've protected my privacy and my life and the cocoon that I have to weave myself into in order to be the writer that I am."

Divorced in 1982 from fellow musician Eric Taylor after a six-year marriage, she lives alone, either at her century-old farmhouse outside Nashville, Tennessee, or in her loft in downtown Dublin, where she is a wildly popular member of the burgeoning Irish country-folk scene. Most of the time she travels, which is where she gets her best musical ideas. "I do most of my writing on the road," she says. "It doesn't matter where I am. It all comes at one time, words and music. I think of my songs as little gifts that I reach out and grab. They just happen."

Gentle and artless but with a strong social bite, Griffith's best songs conjure up a series of four-minute worlds, miniature but universal brushes with blind fate, transient love and life's harsh realities. In Trouble in the Fields, struggling Okie farmers battle the farm depression of the early '80s, "when the bankers swarm like locusts out there, turning away our yield." Lookin' for the Time tells of a forlorn streetwalker who dreams of the day when she can afford to let the cruising "limos just slide on by."

Her most poignant song, Gulf Coast Highway, written with pianist James Hooker and guitarist Danny Flowers, has this refrain: "And when he dies he says he'll catch/ Some blackbird's wing/ Then he will fly away to Heaven/ Come some sweet blue-bonnet spring."

"In the past," Griffith explains, "I wrote mostly fiction, or things I observed, without being part of them. Flyer has been totally different: it is very personal -- real experience, walking into life instead of walking around it."

Real experience means broken love affairs and the cockeyed optimism that attends their apparent demise. Say It Isn't So is couched in Griffith's best straight-ahead vein, as she confronts a lover's waning passion: "Say it isn't so/ Tell me that you're someone/ I'll believe in/ Am I the last to know/ That you don't love me anymore?/ If you ever did ... " The final number, This Heart, finds her rallied and confident: "This heart was almost taken/ This heart had a love of its own/ This heart was reawakened/ When you came along ... / This heart hears the telephone ringin'/ This heart is gonna let it go."

Griffith unapologetically calls herself a folk singer. "It's not the F word to me," she says. "I have been influenced by so many types of music, but that's what folk music is." Strongly melodic, and often with an irresistible hook in the chorus, the songs nevertheless riff freely among country, folk and rock idioms, effortlessly fusing all three. Onstage, she puts them across with gusto, her long hair streaming, her face radiant. She spends 35 weeks a year performing. "For so many years," she explains, "that was the only way to tell people about my new songs. I created an audience, as opposed to waiting for a record company to create it for me."

Still, she considers performing secondary to composing. "I write for other performers," she says. "When someone else records my songs, that is the stamp of approval that says I am doing what I wanted to do." Among those who have covered her songs: Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Suzy Bogguss and Kathy Mattea.

True to form, Griffith professes unconcern over whether Flyer will make her the star she deserves to be. "Whether one person buys my album or 10,000, it + doesn't matter to me. There is still that one person." Maybe so, but it must be nice to draw a crowd.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York