New and Selected Poems

Evenly chosen from six previous volumes of poetry (only The Creole Mephistopheles is in print) and from previously uncollected work, this volume attests not only to the intensity of Lieberman's vision, but to his ability to shape and refine that vision over a 30-year period. His subject, by turns narrow and expansive, is motion itself. Almost anything, from the trivial to the magnificent, can become part of what he views as nature's dance: a mime, a kite tournament, one bird attacking another, even the way a Jamaican native walks: ``your lordly swagger / despite round-shouldered stoop and swaybacked cave-in of spine.'' Whether on land or sea, climbing an ancient Japanese shrine in the shape of Buddha's face or touring a fresco, his speakers are seeking places where ``the Eye, thus illumined, dissects Nature into a mesh, webwork / of geometric solids, / whirling like pinwheels or weathervanes in juxtaposed orbits.'' Readers are not bystanders, but caught up in the winds and waves he writes of. Lieberman's imagery is so vivid that it can sustain these dramatic narrative poems over several pages, each new poem seeming to pick up where the previous one left off. Yet almost buried within all this pomp and ceremony are a few quiet, lyrical gems. (Sept.)