In Your Own Sweet Time

Meditations on ``the strangeness of things,'' the poems in Rollings's ( Transparent Landscapes ) second book repeatedly return to the question of how we can live through the present without sure knowledge of our history or future. Colloquial in language, highly charged with emotion, and dense with a dazzling range of imagesfrom umbilical cords to snapdragons, coal to jaywalking cometsher work does without conventional detail: characters are fugitive and settings immaterial. In their place, Rollings offers the questing (but sometimes ironic) surge of her voice, addressing the reader as a trusted intimate. Writing as a romantic who knows the world too well to believe unconditionally in ideals (``the air is thick with mysteries that will not move on, /flung with wishes and inhibitions that will not move on''), the poet persists in pursuing them, with a bravado tempered provocatively by realism. (Feb.)