The Patience of Ice

Wood's sensitive, frequently autobiographical second book looks back in longing and pain to a childhood in World War II-era Germany, then pulls its readers slowly into an American present dominated by elegy. ""My mother cared most about beauty,"" one sequence begins; ""its absence/ hurt her like sickness, like loss of life."" Surrounded in youth by deprivation, parental distress, and moral ambiguities, it is no wonder Wood's speaker seeks an uncomplicated American beauty (""brambles of blackberries, the plum tree's/ weighted branches""), and no wonder she often finds loss instead. Wood's strongest suit is simple reportage: when she recalls the ""five thousand head of cattle"" her father rescued, or observes (in a suite of poems about aging parents) her mother at 86, Wood (Raised Underground) makes it easy for readers to see what she sees. But the more meditative poems grow predictable: a poem remembering youth in America ends ""ohh for polio,/ for summer gone, and ohhh for us and for, oh, everything."" And another called ""Holding On"" asks ""why one bird sings/ on its lonely perch and another flies straight/ into a country that shatters its heart."" (Nov.)