Cold Reading

This often funny but more often melancholic volume displays Goldstein's major obsessions--Los Angeles, Judaism and poetry. His L.A. is that of the 1950s, when ``War babies came in all colors,'' and ``Hollywood lies where seedy traffic/ found and fostered it,'' a tawdry scene populated by the ghosts of Orson Welles and Raymond Chandler and such broken souls as the subject of the ``Girl at a School for the Emotionally Disturbed.'' Having grown up in an L.A. that ``had its little Israels;/ we lived in one, before it changed color,'' Goldstein deftly explores his estrangement from the city's non-Jewish life, ``the protocols outside my heritage,/ half-secret like the sin of assimilation.'' His best poems join common language to ancient rhythms--as he explains, ``I have in mind a runic mode less fixated,/ neither mourning a picture nor enraged by recollection, nor bound by visual cues.'' Ultimately, Goldstein finds solace from his geographic, religious and artistic tribulations in the comfort of companionship: ``Friendships are so much like poems,/ brief affinities, chance and happy/ conjunctions no one can adequately explain.'' (June)