The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed

""What's left for the mature artist but an examination of method?"" Cooper inquires of Willa Cather in ""Vocation: A Life,"" the long final poem in this splendid book. Cooper, who is now 75, gathers here all the work of her careful, compassionate career. The volume contains no poems written after 1993; Cooper has, however, ""reclaimed"" 18 poems left out of her five earlier books, hoping to ""add to the humanness of the story all the poems tell."" Sometimes this is the story of Cooper's life; at other times it is a story about her generation's experience, and about places she has seen (Manhattan, Georgia, Florida, postwar Europe). Poems return over and over to the aftermath of World War II (""P.O.W.,"" ""After the Bomb Tests""), to her family's Southern background, to the experience of seriously ill children, and to Cooper's own ""sensuous, precious, upper-class/ unjust white child's past."" Other prominent later poems address the lives of women artists and activists, among them Georgia O'Keeffe, Muriel Rukeyser, Rosa Luxemburg, and Cather. The early poems sparkle quite elegantly (""the water birds like lines of rain/ Rise from the penciled grasses by the river""); the later work flaunts self-interrogations, second thoughts, breakings-off and interpolated quotations, very much in the manner of Adrienne Rich. Cooper also reprints her introspective autobiographical essay of 1974, ""Nothing Has Been Used in the Manufacture of This Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread."" Serious and generous, The Flashboat should win Cooper many admirers; if her poems offer no new formal models for the commitments she envisions, they certainly reveal her dedication, portraying an artist who has always joyfully chosen ""work,/ the starry waters."" (Oct.)