Our Selves: New Poems

``Live-ins'' and ``roommates'' are what Bronk (Some Words) calls the mind, the life abiding in the body. Our selves, he suggests, are self-invented, ghostly, kept in perishable tissue. As a result of this painful perception, physical remoteness, tentativeness and spartan expressiveness mark the abbreviated, nearly aphoristic verse in Bronk's new collection. Each small poem reflects a poetic instant, stilled and opaqued, which documents the tenuousness and brevity of life. Many of the poems recall Rilke's World in his Duino Elegies: ``It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down. We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.'' Nothingness is not cause for anxiety or cynicism, but for earnest celebration. In ``Shelter,'' for example, Bronk makes clear that ``the wild incomprehensible is always there,'' bound to intrude, sometimes heartlessly and cruelly, or with a finesse that awes and pleases. But he perceives lives as more than necessary fictions devised against the absurdity of eternity; belief reappears continually in his work as a salvation. (Oct.)