Madly in Love

""Late one summer night he tore through/ her latched screen door, his trousers/ in his hand, and declared his love."" So begins the title poem, which leads off a charmed yet haunting collection that tracks and explores the weather patterns of longing, depression and despair. The ""he"" in the above quote is a librarian--perhaps the ultimate personification of quiet desperation--and his madness is par for Barnstone's passionate summers of ""tornadoes, rivers flooding their banks,// agitated dreams, desire."" In winter, however, yearnings are safely packed in ice; complacency and melancholia are the snowfall, and the only visitors to the poet's bed are the ghosts of a suicide uncle and grandfather. Spring arrives with insistence, ""irises poke green/ butterknives through dark dirt,"" and Barnstone takes to the water--a shower, a bath, a swim in the river--to soothe her body, with hope that love and sex will converge and her heart will rise. Scattered throughout these 29 poems are phrases borrowed from Emily Dickinson. Indeed, Dickinson's influence is apparent in Barnstone's deceptively simple lines, a matter-of-factness that seems to come straight from her bloodstream and a hushed urgency that is deafening. (Apr.)