What Silence Equals: Poems

The subject of Dent's admittedly autobiographical first collection is intriguing: these are the poems of a woman suffering from AIDS. While several books have appeared from the male perspective and women have contributed poems to anthologies, this ought to be a landmark volume. Such weight only makes the book's shortcomings more disastrous. Emotion is barely detectable. Dent's long lines are chopped-up prose, and even as prose they'd be boring: ``So the ignorant stumbled out of bliss as stockbrokers did in '29 / their limbs wriggling the way a spider descends / into a void of volition. . . .'' Even poems written to such tunes as Jimmy Cliff's ``Many Rivers to Cross'' or Percy Sledge's ``At the Dark End of the Street'' bear no traces of lyricism. Imagery is sparse and predictable: eyes ``sparkle like zircon diamonds,'' clouds are ``tearful,'' lips are ``zipped together.'' Large words are thrown in seemingly to no other purpose than to prove the poet's superiority to her readers: ``noyade,'' ``mullocky,'' ``metalanguage,'' ``apheliotropically.'' Inverted grammar lends a stilted quality. An attenuated introduction by Sharon Olds ( The Father ) does little more than quote from the book itself. (Dec.)