Cruelest Month

The number of titles published during National Poetry Month strained this column's space, but the following titles can just as easily help celebrate the solstice.

The title poem of Martín Espada's Alabanza: New And Selected Poems 1982— 2002, is one of nearly 20 new pieces in this summation of 20 years of work. The poem is subtitled "In Praise of Local 100," for the 43 members of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union killed when Windows on the World was destroyed, and it closes the book: "Alabanza I say, even if God has no face." "Alabanza" means "Praise." (Norton, $24.95 256p ISBN 0-393-05192-7)

In her fifth collection over nearly 20 years, Mary Jo Salter takes in "TWA 800," "School Pictures," "The Big Sleep," "Peonies" and many other joys and disasters through Open Shutters. (Knopf, $23 88p ISBN 1-4000-4008-6)

"Blue glass tends to replace/ lapis" remarks the speaker of Reginald Shepherd's Otherhood, and his laconic, angry and intimate reflections over more than 40 lyrics make this fourth collection "skin annotated by the wound/ that explicates his mortality." (Univ. of Pittsburgh, $12.95 paper 108p ISBN 0-8229-5797-3)

In preaching Feminine Gospels, Manchester, U.K.—based poet Carol Ann Duffy creates speakers to articulate "The Diet," "The Woman Who Shopped," "The Laughter of Swofford Girls High" and a woman "dreaming/ till the stars are blue in the face/ printing the news of their old light." (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22 80p ISBN 0-571-21187-9)

With a poem titled "How to Stop Writing About Indians" followed by "How to Write About White People," it's clear that Annharte, of the Little Saskatchewan First Nations, refuses to "[k]eep the tongue from prying open the coffin" in Exercises in Lip Pointing, a terrific third collection where "antlers point right over to the Labatt's box." (New Star [newstarbooks.com], $16 paper 96p ISBN 0-921586-92-2)

The detached, elongated prose paragraphs of Killarney Clary's Potential Stranger, her third collection, are framed with cold white space, much like an initial meeting, where "That quick shadow below the bridge has something pressing to tell about nearly effortless transformation." (Univ. of Chicago, $14 paper 72p ISBN 0-226-10931-3)

From noting that "I've Always Despised the Wetlands" to channeling Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder," the trade-offs of Ira Sadoff's latest collection, Barter, lead to semi-ironic leaps of diction, "cherubim on bicycles/ painted over with a dog and a few affairs." (Univ. of Illinois, $34.95 80p ISBN 0-252-02834-1; $15.95 paper -07120-4)

The fourth book from Four Way Books co-editor Dzvinia Orlowsky finds, in poems like "At Any Given Moment," that "God and Dog accelerate to the speed of light,/ come back as angry fork," and thus includes everything Except for One Obscene Brushstroke. (Carnegie Mellon Univ., $12.95 paper 72p ISBN 0-88748-387-9)

"The beach is still bright./ The children I never had/ run to the edge" in the harsh, melancholic Slow Air carved into precise eddies by Robin Robertson. Following up on the London poet's debut A Painted Field, these lyrics aim straight for "the steady burning pilot/ light of fear behind the eyes." (Harcourt, $23 80p ISBN 0-15-100746-2)

In joyous, orthographically inflected line drawings and sans serif, multilingual, open-field verse, Cecilia Vicuña brings into being the poems of Instant, instantiating a "time bending tongue.../ double thread/ madder del Habra" over the course of this beautifully printed collection, which compliments Vicuña's sculptures, artist's books and performances with vivid filaments. (Kelsey Street, $15 paper 88p 0-932716-50-4)

The former poet laureate (when the job was called "Consultant in Poetry"), Daniel Hoffman was also a Yale Younger Poet and is now professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems 1948—2003 excludes his longer and two book-length poems, and arranges these lyrics thematically, with the hope "that they will each give pleasure." (Louisiana State Univ., $49.95 232p ISBN 0-8071-2860-0; $26.95 paper -2861-9)

A noted anthologist of Russian poets and younger U.S. writers, Leonard Schwartz here files from The Tower of Diverse Shores, working to "Steam off rocks of this perception," whether it be "lusts for a material language," "A porthole looking out/ over our own estrangement" or an urban phantasmagoria where "Over the city's bestudded darkness/ Raptorial urgencies storm." (Talisman [Acorn Alliance, dist.], $14.95 paper 136p ISBN 1-58498-031-1)

Written more than 10 years ago, the fourth full collection from Laynie Browne, Pollen Memory, consists of spellbinding recto commands ("Stop searching the rose") with elegant explanations and sober amplifications verso: "Allow transparency to provide a middle. A key until you try." (Tender Buttons [SPD, dist.], $11.95 paper 72p ISBN 0-927920-13-1)

"I'm not going to write anything out of guilt, I mean grief" writes Maggie Nelson in her second warily exuberant collection. Passing the late Kenneth Koch and Eileen Myles on her way "Deeper/ into the dream," Nelson makes The Latest Winter into "wagons, kabobs, sugar-dips, cannons" and sets herself "apart in a/ made up way." (Hanging Loose, $21 104p ISBN 1-931236-22-4; $13 paper -21-6)

Basing their recent correspondence entirely on poems shot back and forth from Jim Harrison's Montana and southern Arizona to Ted Kooser's Nebraska, the two poets have published the results in the epistolary collaboration Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry. The short, haiku-like poems, unattributed individually to either poet, admonish readers to "Look again: that's not/ a yellow oak leaf on the path,/ but the breastplate of a turtle." (Copper Canyon, $15 paper 96p ISBN 1-55659-187-X)

The title of Sheri-dWilson's fifth collection, Between Lovers, simultaneously suggests absence and sandwiching, which is just how this Western Canada—based poet, who in one poem contemplates "The Blue Balls of God" while in another opines "My breasts aren't finished yet," finds most things work out—at once too much and not enough, "Gravity, in levity." (Arsenal Pulp [arsenalpulp.com], $12.95 paper 112p ISBN 1-55152-124-5)

Co-curator of the famed KGB reading series in New York, poet and photographer Star Black checks in with her fifth collection, Ghostwood, which inaugurates the publisher's New York Poets series, and begins with a series of poems on September 11, "So many walked and walked and did not talk./ All dressed for the office. There were no offices." (Melville House [melvillehousebooks.com], $20 80p ISBN 0-9718659-3-0)

"Periwinkle drowns pentimenti—almost/ could be a headline," notes the speaker of Serious Pink, Sharon Dolin's collection of poems written from art work by Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell and others: "Rosettes/ are not poppies/ but moments of attention/ burned into the wall." (Marsh Hawk [MarshHawkPress.org], $15 paper 88p ISBN 0-9713332-6-2)