cover image As Earth Begins to End

As Earth Begins to End

Patricia Goedicke. Copper Canyon Press, $14 (124pp) ISBN 978-1-55659-134-1

Goedicke's scattered but passionate twelfth book anticipates her own and her husband's old age and death, laments the endangered global ecosystem and sometimes equates the planet's fate with their own: ""I've never been able to tell,"" the title poem admits, ""where we end and earth begins beyond us."" Goedicke's rapid and often lengthy lines, her frequent all-over-the-page stanzaic layouts and her abrupt tonal jumps suffuse her poems with a desperate, eclectic energy, one that counterpoints the poems' quotidian occasions--a shared meal, a shared bed, TV ""snow,"" a house cat. If her visual descriptions falter, she makes up for it with a superb understanding of pace and of breath: her arrangements of phrases, even single words, into tenuous verse-paragraphs often describe an attempt to draw lasting strength from some glimpsed symbol or happy moment. Goedicke's penchant for evocative abstractions can make her poems, and their titles, blur together: is ""What Holds Us Together"" only ""What the Dust Does,"" or does it include ""The Things I May Not Say""? And her associative enthusiasms can generate clich s and mixed metaphors: during a marital quarrel ""black golfballs run down the face as the house jackhammers ... into two poles staring across chasms."" But such imprecisions may be a worthwhile price to pay for the best of Goedicke's new work--for its desperation of last chances (""the random cha-cha of cells hacked/ into smaller metaphysical tatters""); for its strikingly juxtaposed, compact images, from gulls and oceans to skyscrapers and ""little cakes""; for its exploration of life's approaching endings, and of the energies we need to face them. (Jan.)