TO TELL THE LAMP

When is seeing believing? Is knowing only recording? What "patterns of saying/ Produce misgivings in us," and when are "existing and desiring not the same thing"? These and other weightily abstract questions take center stage in Lubasch's thoughtful third collection. Opening with an extended Gertrude Stein-ish discourse ("Certainly sheltering being is an applaudable thing"), the New York–based Lubasch diversifies her meditations into four sets of shorter poems indebted in spots to George Oppen; a concluding ode, positioning phrases all over the visual page, echoes more recent visual and verbal patternings. The whole collection, however, pivots on Lubasch's use of gerunds ("This pattern of listening/ To the imagined desire/ Is what we call living"), and keeps its focus tightly on the mechanisms of perception and consciousness, "the condition of its intensity." Lubasch (How Many More of Them Are You? ), who helps run the Franco-American journal DoubleChange , is making a sterling name for herself as a translator of modernist French writing, and her work here shows a French accent in its intellectual ambitions and in its unapologetic confinement to a small range of philosophical words. These four smart sequences mount a canny, and doubtless deliberate, challenge to all those Americans who think poems need luminous images: she asks us to see, instead, the light of thinking in what she is saying. (May)