Sister Betty Reads the Whole You

With reportage at once cranky and lush, Holahan takes on single motherhood and family, class and the classics, rendering our impulsive approaches to each other: ""What a tiny baby! yells a ruffled woman./ Tiny baby! she screams halfway here, Baby!"" Her debut tracks Eurydice's vanishing and traces ""Paper Hats Like Sailors' Caps"" on the heads of women walking together, ""trading work-hell stories."" Holahan's remembrances of postwar childhood, late Vietnam-era child rearing and lefty political protest often come through in a difficult, sometimes crabbed syntax, but one that seems apt given some of the surroundings and situations she describes: a down-and-out New Haven; widowhood; friends who have died, the poet Jane Kenyon among them. But the lighter moments--""Your mint"" sniffs someone who sounds like the poet's mother, surveying the poet's garden, ""has eaten the little tulips""--more than counterbalance the shadows. The brilliant ""History of Food"" links the Rosenbergs, co-op day care and quips like ""Take-out firms mushroomed before anyone could spell/ Chernobyl."" Fierce, funny and unforgiving, this mature first outing is also intimate and, finally, loving: ""My sun/ has returned with crushed, soaked weeds and/ flowerheads more brown than fulvous yellow./ I don't know/ what else I can ask from this life."" (May)