Barbarism

McQuade is already well known as a poetry journalist (Stealing Glimpses) and editor (By Herself). (She is also a former poetry editor of PW.) This first book of her own poems displays descriptive vigor and emotive verve. Fauna and flora cavort, writhe or unfold amid McQuade's effusive visuality: foxes, peonies, lichen, owls, ""Delphinium,"" cotyledon, caterpillar and Queen Anne's Lace provide details and analogies for McQuade's explorations of versatile, volatile psychic states. In the title poem, a spider ""hurts the apparatus/ as an iron can ruin ruffles./ A barbarism is inside us."" Poems on forest creatures leap and dangle like flying squirrels; a wonderfully compact consideration of hydrangea links Victorian gardeners to the primeval moon. But McQuade's attitudes--for which the plants and the animals stand--aren't always as compelling, or as surprising, as her style requires them to be: many of her questions and answers, her showy alliterations and exclamations, seem merely rhetorical, or exaggerated to the point of bathos. A poem about earthworms concludes that ""the comedown of deepness// under us/ is so sudden, simple,/ harmless."" ""Blood"" explains ""I am alone, and my blood beats,/ and yours does."" And ""Honeysuckle"" ends with the poet exactly where we might expect her to be: ""tickled in a thin green tide/ of honey,/ sucking on the strings of a song."" The best of McQuade's botanical investigations and syncopated verbal riffs should please readers of Alice Fulton or Richard Foerster, whose naturalist bent McQuade shares. (June)