Alma

This volume introduces a fascinating lyric voice. Personal yet abstract, Gregg's poetry is stringently stylized while giving the impression of perfect, naive naturalness. She is feminine and emotional, wistfully childlike and primitive in a sacred and mythopoetic way, yet particularly persuasive because of her urgency. The poems give the impression of confrontations by evasion and reduction, as if Gregg's experiences of love and death are too intense and private to be shared in full, and had to be evoked by the plucking of odd and plangent strings: ""Far is where I am near./ Far is where I live./ My house is in the far./ The night is still.'' These wraithlike murmurings are an effective alliance of form and pure, unadulterated feeling that purpose ``to get beyond ourselves, beyond this world.'' Foreign rights: Random House. January