The poems in James Applewhite's eighth collection, Daytime and Starlight, like most of Applewhite's work, continue to expand and explore the poet's contemporary awareness of history. These are clear, powerful poems, gentle in tone, varied in subject matter, and masterful in execution. The poet's careful eye misses nothing, whether he is contemplating the "old stars" of Hollywood, or the "no-longer-mobile homes already tombs, even/ before the tornado comes" that "poke their white snouts out like bad/ jokes from groves" or even "the remnant Aurelian wall" where "Roman girls . . . wrap/ legs around their men to kiss."
      Running through the book are various memories and evocations of fathers, from the poet's own father ("Father and Son," "The Mortal Father") to literary and artistic predecessors ("Wrightsville, Thinking of Wordsworth," "On Winslow Homer's Weaning the Calf") to the poet himself as father in "Sailing the Inlet," to even the pope, who makes an appearance in "A Distant Father."
      Formally, the range of Daytime and Starlight is impressive. The quatrain is the stanza unit of choice, and Applewhite is at home whether he is writing in free verse, long meter, rhyming couplets, or some arrangement of his own devising. Indeed, even the "In Memoriam" stanza makes anvariation, these are for the most part quiet poems, as if Applewhite is concerned lest verbal and formal pyrotechnics overshadow the people and spaces these poems remember and evoke. Slant or off rhyme predominates, and this tendency, along with a relatively loose metrical line, combine to create a subtle music that persuades before it is recognized.
      Followers of Applewhite's career may feel that Daytime and Starlight isn't quite as successful a book as its immediate predecessor, the sublime A History of the River, but that doesn't mean it isn't a book of poetry worth owning. It is.
                  —Mike Smith

      In Pursuit of a Wound, Sydney Lea presents a world where nothing is stagnant, where hospitals resemble airport terminals, houses burn, people and animals die, songs and hearing fade, and where the "trout have vanished,/along with some of us." In this, his seventh collection, Lea looms over his poems as a man nearing sixty, sentimental and furnishing a poet's love and attention to names and places. The disjunction between the eternal and the ephemeral drives these poems in their pursuit of salvaging lives and details from the realm of the "trivial and slight" hough what sort, exactly, none of us could say."
      The collection begins with the title poem, which says, "Today, in the vines, I saw a clutch of pheasants, the mother hen flopping from me as if—wounded. As if I'd pursue a wound. Which of course, I did." It is almost as if by the very composing of these poems, Lea chooses to participate in a world where "a famous poet's phrase about things being 'yoked together by violence'" were the overriding mantra. From the death of a frog shot and fried for supper with "legs kicking in the pan" to the death of Freddy who was "mowed down" by a car, these poems, pursuing their wounds, vow "to wander, in proper wonder, a valley in the shadow of death."
      The book is divided into four parts. In part one, "Reasons to Hate Poetry," Lea intimates that poetry is "yoked together by violence" to loss. In the title poem to this section, we see how invention is spurred by unfortunate situations which immediately, to the poet, begin presenting significance and symbolism. Lea writes, "Our sensitive poet puts Jim in a nearby clinic, a tangle of I.V. tubes/in his body, sedated because it gets violent because he's got no notion of Fate,/is not like us—o childhood! o innocence! And though we won't say it,/a part of us breathes: a poem! a poem!" and "The helicopter, air ambulance that drones/above, will present a figure. For something. We'll dream it up later."
      In part two, "Local Story," Lea retreats into the world of loss with a long list of the departed and departing. have cancer, "Poor Freddy Dunbar" the "Village Fool" who was run down by a car, Breck who "hanged himself at twenty-two," a drowned girl, a waitress whose son was killed by a drunk driver, and even dying pumpkins.
      In "Fin de Siècle," the schisms between what could have been and what is, between the eternal and the ephemeral, are made apparent. In "Girls in Their Upstairs Windows," the speaker reminisces on two childhood loves: "His two youngest daughters can race across the lawn/To swim in their pond, while their father scribbles a poem,/One that—despite the evident blessings—leans/On other dreams that fell over him." In "Ars Longa, Vita Brevis," the irony of finite human lives is contrasted against seemingly immortal literary works of great significance. (Shakespeare and Chaucer are invoked here, but Lea wonders "Do people still take heart from Bishop's 'One Art'?"). He builds this irony by introducing the trivial (and therefore the disparaging): a carving in a tree—a girl's name "SUZI" and the year "'96." In the title poem to this section, Lea contrasts the details of family life with seemingly permanent landmarks, all duly named: "The Lookout," "Connecticut River," and of course, "a patch of open water she called The Gash." Lea writes, "Again and again/I go on The Lookout, the view by now so familiar/It seems eternal, which makes me (though I know better)/Think of myself up here as eternal too."
      In the last section, "Phases," Lea attempts to reconcile the irony and terror of mood-altering medication (Zoloft) and supposed reality, all theof its toils of loss and emotional cost, life is good, and the ability to "care and weep for the local boy who lately died" is good as well. Towards the end of this seven-page poem, written in quatrains that wax and wane as their title suggests, Lea asks, "Where am I heading?" The reader is tempted to answer: in Pursuit of a Wound.
                  —Jenny Boully

      Julianna Baggott's first novel, Girl Talk, is the story of Lissy Jablonski and the truth she discovers after her father, Dr. Bob Jablonski, runs away from home during her fifteenth summer. In response to Dr. Jablonski's abandonment, Lissy and her mother, Dotty, depart for their own adventures and late-night sessions of "girl talk," conversations in which Dotty informs her daughter about life prior to Lissy's birth. During these confessions, Lissy learns that the man who raised her isn't her father.
      Besides discovering that her mother is adept at covering up and distorting the truth, Lissy also discovers a set of grandparents she didn't know she had, her mother's first love and other secrets revealed, all of which add up to a poignant break-through for Lissy and her mother.       The book is peopled by such folks as Kitty Hawk, Lissy's stripper- roomate; Church Fiske, her old boyfriend who, though quite wealthy, longs to be partantuliano, a one- eyed Lothorio with a huge penis.
      Girl Talk is also the story of Lissy as an adult, a writer for an advertising company who finds herself pregnant and pushing thirty, unmarried and unmoored. In alternating chapters, the grown-up Lissy speaks and remembers that summer that her mother claims later it never happened. Listen as she describes Dotty, who isn't exactly a typical mother:
      "It was all a surprise to me, beginning that one night when I stumbled from bed, a gawky fifteen-year-old girl (back when gawky was just on the verge of being sexy, but not quite yet) and found my mother in the kitchen, wearing a black bathing suit, standing in the glow of the refrigerator light. She was bent over, leaning in, her head slightly lifted to cool her back. I can still see her lit up in the refrigerator in that pose, like an immodest starlet on an otherwise dark stage."
      Baggott is a versatile writer with many short stories and poems in print. Her poetry collection, This Country of Mothers, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press. Baggott's eye for detail and her love of quirky characters add spice to this coming-of-age tale.
                  —Anne Barnhill

     Collections of early poetry often provide a topography of the poet's aesthetic development. At times they are dominated by career concerns. It is naive, however, to believe that any published documentary volume can completely escape commodification. Hipster audiences and academic cliques are dominaing the publishing industry and when one discovers a collection that actually maps out a poet's maturation it is a find. Kleinzahler's volume is made from out-of-print chapbooks and small press printings.
     His mature work (Green Sees Things in Waves and Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow) has marked him as a poet of minutiae expansiveness, verbal craftiness and urban wit. All these traits can be clearly seen in the poems of Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club. At his best, Kleinzahler is able to draw a deft lyric that captures instances, moods, in a way that brings vibrancy to the settings and uniqueness to his characters. At his worst, his poems are over-revved slam-fest "poems" that merely annoy rather than provoke. What is of prime concern is the lyric and its almost pastoral feel at times; moments of weather and seasonal change are what provide the back drop (and usually titles) for Kleinzahler's best work, as in the poem "The Inland Passage":

And when the weather breaks
in a country like that, where
spring and autumn don't seem
to change a thing, a curious
distress comes to most faces
and the mountains, disrobed
of their twists, loom
above the town
with an unreal acuity.
It was on a day like that
I left.

Now curtain drawn
earlier each evening and the dinner
      wine
left half-finished
while outside the pine boughs
      and cedar
take on a new life in wind,

their bounding shadows
And elaborate display on walls.

The gray old man at the door
of his TV shop pauses,
bent
with pain shooting through like
      the express

at a local stop. Gas
maybe
or cancer working the membranes

She's talking to herself
or somebody
spasm talk
heaving
broken apart
as it escapes her weather

            ***

Faces staring
as bus makes its turn
she'll lay her stripe down
when the air gets still
she'll slip right in
and make you breathe
wrong

Before the heavens were busy
      with Sputniks
and idiot beeps that say hey! To
      to far-off worlds
we ran at the lights with jars. We
      ran and ran
until nothing was left of our bodies
      to spend.

And ache so sweet was born
      those nights
in the heat, in the grass, at
      summer's waning
that we try for it years later in
      the dance
of lust and lust's passing.

That's really quite a lovely figure
you bring off
with those morphemes
arrayed so that when taken up by
      the mind
they deploy into a kind of umbrella
ranged round an emotion
fleeting and delicate as to seem
the afterimage of an emotion
or of a dream perhaps
or nothing at all,
but always with that high finish,
your signature
the delightful origami of an
      exiled prince