Color is the Suffering of Light: A Memoir

``Language was a sunstruck, white-water river, full of aquamarine lagoons.'' Green (The Squanicook Ecologues), an award-winning poet, chronicles her family's epically difficult ``unwritten history,'' while also telling the story of how one writer came to writing. Her memoir is exhilarating not only because she is able to characterize the violence, vigor and dismay of generations, but because Green demonstrates in virtually every sentence the power of words to restore a life that might otherwise have been wrecked by circumstance. She grew up a farmer's daughter during the 1960s in Townsend, Mass., in the household's ``heavy, ponderous vapor of unspoken feelings.'' Resorting frequently to fairy tales, myths and dreams as narrative forms, Green travels in and through her family's legendary alcoholism, batterings and other extraordinary sufferings, including her own suicide attempt at eight and her paternal grandmother's repeated sexual overtures. But to sum up or redress a life's cruelties is not Green's point. Instead, she wrests control from hardship by fathoming it in a long and lavish burst of language. Her intelligence is harrowing-and ecstatic. (Jan.)