cover image Rapture: Poems

Rapture: Poems

Susan Mitchell. Harper Perennial, $22 (90pp) ISBN 978-0-06-055320-3

The boldness of Mitchell's ( The Water Inside the Water ) tone is established with startling openings and audacious connections from one subject to the next. Sometimes there are flashes of Erica Jong's sexual bravura or Diane Wakoski's offbeat associative leaps. In one poem the speaker begins with the memory of a line of conversation, ``He said I want to kiss you in a way / no one has ever kissed you before.'' After recalling fantasies of adolescence, she returns to the braggadocio of the opening remark, far more memorable than the kiss itself, which was offered like the careless eating of an apple or pear. Mitchell's imagery is often quite attractive. For example, a dressmaker's house visited in childhood was entirely ``furred like a cat.'' Most of the poems are built in informal and colloquial blocks of language, the lines breaking to emphasize ironies. The settings are various: Cuba in the '50s, a bar in Chicago, the pond outside a Howard Johnson's motel. In the last poem lies a confession: ``my subject is not what it seems. I want / to explain how it is for me / all the time now. . . . '' In fact, this unabashed self-absorption is at the center of all the work. (Apr.)