Corridor

``I dreamed it was November 1930'' begins ``Street Music,'' the lead and bestpoem in Aaron's second collection. A beggar woman playing an accordion catches his eye but, since he is both dreaming and not yet born, he cannot approach her. This same bland dream vista permits the poet to remain an uninvolved observer in the poems that follow. The tendency becomes increasingly irritating in poems such as ``Cigarettes,'' an elegy by a former smoker, where more personal events are viewed as part of the same distanced, hazy landscape. Some pieces hint at a historical significance that is never brought into focus; others document the lives of figures such as Paracelsus, Julio Cortazar and the Huns, but since the poet fails to transform them into living, breathing creatures, the poems sound like academic exercises. Readers can get these facts from any reference work, as Aaron himself does in a poem that points up the errors and obsolescence of the 1929 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Aaron was a National Poetry series winner for Second Sight . (July)