Only Bread, Only Light

Planet of the Blind, a bestseller and New York Times Notable memoir that landed Kuusisto on Oprah, Dateline and other shows in 1998, has a companion volume in this slim, winning collection. Kuusisto successfully melds music, memory, and his wide-ranging erudition into quiet depictions of his experiences, presenting everything from evocations of a boyhood in Helsinki to earnest poems for Ted Berrigan, ""Rachmaninoff's Curtains"" and Ogden Nash. Some of its most powerful moments reside in the poet's accounts of his failing eyesight: ""Each morning/ I live with less color:/ The lawn turns gray,/ The great-laurel is gravid/ With flint as if it might burn/ In the next life./ Even the persimmon tree/ Is clear as a wine stem."" Showing considerable dexterity, Kuusisto also works at times in a more traditional style that draws on surrealism, folklore and metaphysical verse. While too many poems suffer from decorative passages and tidy closure, others show Kuusisto marshalling considerable skills to create finely tuned descriptions of events past and present. In its best moments, this book succeeds in rendering the world both beautiful and strange: ""The trees are foreign soldiers/ Talking low in a different tongue."" (Oct.)