The Only World: Poems

Hull's (Star Ledger) long, intriguingly complex poems often send readers back to discover how she took them from point A to point B. Here the opening poem serves as fit introduction to her subject matter: three urban adolescent girls in the mid-'60s dress up and imitate the Supremes and the Vandellas; less than a year later, one is pregnant, gang-raped, out of school; ``I'm a lucky bitch,'' the poet knows. Next come memorials for deceased friends of a reckless youth, victims of AIDS, drugs, prostitution, abuse in all the ``parallel lives, the ones/ I didn't choose, the one that kept her.'' Hull's hungry receptiveness permits easy identification with others, even those she's only heard about, such as her mother's family, Polish Jews caught in the Holocaust. This glittering, elegiac collection (``& it's just me here, the one who's left'') is ultimately, hauntingly, an elegy for herself. Hull died in an auto accident in March 1994; these poems were compiled by her husband, the poet David Wojahn. (June)