cover image And, for Example

And, for Example

Ann Lauterbach, Anne Lauterbach. Viking Books, $25.95 (128pp) ISBN 978-0-670-85883-5

One of the fascinations of Lauterbach's (Clamor) poetry is the way it inhabits space, seeming to expand it-and a reader's consciousness-with bold and individual precisions tuned over the entire expanse of a page. An apt comparison of a Lauterbach poem might be with an Einsteinian kind of etching that defies expectations of speed, amplitude, direction and logic. Her work asks us not to be either too firmly situated or too unsituated: ``Things,'' she observes in ``Harm's Way, Arm's Reach,'' ``are not cured by resilience.'' An eye, she ventures, is ``dialectical and unreasoned.'' The wit of such uncertainties is seductive, but ultimately freeing, like a polyrhythmic reverie elusive of subject; a reader submits gladly, entranced by all the exits and the transits she has permitted. This is Lauterbach's fifth book; she is a recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. (Nov.)