A House, a Home

In this starkly evocative book, Goffstein uses photographs of a dollhouse made of cardboard and wood that illustrate her views about the relationship between people and the houses they make into homes: ``A house has skin / and eyes / and bone, / a head, / a breast, / a heart.'' People, represented by the same carved wooden figures Goffstein used in Our Prairie Home , ``lovingly replace / the house's broken windowpanes / repair its frame, mend its roof'' and their ``jokes and songs / rise to its ceilings, / and rest beneath its roof.'' The repetitive photographs are somber, abstract and static. The ``breast'' of the house, for example, is represented by a wall with three red-framed windows, a paint-peeled joist and a vague shadow. Still, the book's elegant artfulness is bound to be admired by Goffstein's adult fans. All ages. (Sept.)