Her Yes

In her first book, Vaeth writes with the spare profligacy of a sensualist who is sometimes brought up short by loss. As she suggests, ``Let all of us belong to the sunlit now and move / from surprise to surprise.'' Her best work seizes us with an immediacy of perception, and with an appetite for more. As though smitten by an instant, Vaeth finds the word or words for it with an almost physical intensity of engagement. But her poetry also seeks to capture the fleeting quality of experience; in vaults from thought to thought, she may appear to want to evade most standard connection as a falseness or disappointment. The result can seem giddy or (in meaning) remote. Vaeth thrives in her longer work; some of the short poems (``Here Is My Kiss,'' ``One Hour of Joy''), and a three-part poem, ``Mrs. Einstein,'' amount to less than they might in density, craft or scope. Among her finest are ``Akhmatova's Voice,'' ``Speeding North in June,'' ``Friendship Among Women'' and ``Falling Into and Out Of''--all of them vivid, affirmative and surprising. (Apr.)