cover image Take Three: 2

Take Three: 2

Susan Aizenberg, Suzanne Qauls. Graywolf Press, $12.95 (128pp) ISBN 978-1-55597-254-7

Featured in this welcome second volume in the series are collections by three poets who have contributed to AGNI's biannual journal, Susan Aizenberg, Mark Turpin and Suzanne Qualls. Aizenberg (poetry editor of the Nebraska Review) displays a haunted, weary wonder in ""Art"" where she writes about the stories she hears from high-school students and describes her son's arrest and hospitalization: ""--I don't know how to make things/ ordinary anymore, though I dress and go to work/ each day as if the world were ordinary...carefully/ rounded characters strolling bucolic paths,/ safe beneath lucid trees."" Also striking is ""Grand Street,"" which focuses on a homeless woman amid Christmas shoppers in New York. Turpin emerges as the star of this collection as he describes with resounding dexterity the tasks of his carpenter's life. ""Pickwork"" begins, ""There is skill to it, how you hold your back all day, the dole/ of force behind the stroke, the size of bite, where/ to hit,..."" The eight lines of ""Raising Walls"" are marked by a steadied pace of words chosen as carefully as tools: ""The urge is always upwards--joist, stud,/ Rafter, ridge./ Arches and portals;/ Ribs of whales and elephants."" Performance artist Qualls meditates on the inner life in ""Beauty, and Instinct."" ""Focusing"" is about vision and ranges from a refusal to wear glasses (""I'd have to look for them"") to seeing herself for the first time: ""But now I confess there's a bone in my cheek,/ and a waist begins to show/ inside my dress."" Internal and external sight lines unite this sampler, which delivers further on the promise of the Take Three series. (Mar.)