Anatomy Errata

Hall's showy poems flit from detail to detail like the butterfly of ""The Monarch Birthmark,"" which opens her second collection. Monarchs feed on toxic milkweed; Hall's poems feed on her struggles with the toxic rules imposed on girls and women, with breast cancer, and with her vexing, revered mother. Hall (To Put the Mouth to, 1992) can be content, especially in the poems confronting cancer, to alternate the conventionally beautiful with the conventionally ugly: ""Pink-stemmed flushes,/ Shades of plasma; doubled burgundies and dusky/ Roses; weltered flesh...."" Her verse tries to out-razzle the smug, resented doctors, to out-talk fear and disease: ""over// And over, carcinomas muscle to the music:/ So mellifluous/ A melanoma that we dance."" Her longer poems can lapse into other people's styles: Frank Bidart's in ""Mother,"" Stevens's in ""To Come with Accessories,"" more often that of Marianne Moore--or of Anne Sexton. Hall weaves superb single lines within her fugue-like forms, as in a near refrain from her poem on Shirley Temple: ""The child who knows her lines knows what to say."" Her best poems eschew collage and confession for more compressed, more general approaches. ""The Other Girls in Lettuce,"" in the virtuosic Proven al ballade form, imagines salad-eating girls cannibalizing a rule-breaker who won't conceal her hunger: ""If girls are eating, they will have to hide."" Beyond a sometimes contrived prettiness or literalness, Hall's genuine note is a defiant flipness. The poet of lines like ""I'd turn my face to the wall but everyone does"" may yet become a writer attentive readers trust. (Jan.) FYI: Hall is the poetry editor of the Antioch Review.