THE WIND, MASTER CHERRY, THE WIND

Szporluk's compellingly slippery third volume includes sharp wit, linguistic subtleties, and an ambitious seriousness about parents, children, ecology, fairy tales, women's bodies and spiritual need. Her disarming opening poems find plays on words near bodies of water: "Come, swim, under./ The summer flounder compound's/ in a thunder," one begins. In "Fruit of Discord" ludic language gradually opens to reveal real loneliness: "To construct/ a man made of grass/ is the grass widow's need." A strong lyric sequence names poems after kinds of winds, from China's "Sz" to the Swiss Alps' "Schneefresser," where "A boy glitters,/ becoming snow": each wind represents, it slowly becomes clear, both a way of regarding the earth and a kind of human need. The more directly stated sequence "Pineal Body" riffs and reimagines the tale of Pinocchio, while a last set of lyric poems returns to yearnings and affections: "Here comes a girl with a gill for a lung/ crossing the morning." Szporluk (Isolato) can write directly about sex ("flat on my back/ on the combed earth") or with allusive elision; she now shows influences not normally found together, combining the light touch (and short lines) of Kay Ryan, and the stormy romantic strains of Dylan Thomas. Szporluk is often successful in finding correlatives, aeolian or otherwise, for the larger contexts of personal passions, making this a very promising book indeed. (Sept.)