Off-Season at the Edge of the World: Poems

Greger ( The 1002nd Night ) opens her fourth collection with a playful, self-referential poem, ``Envoi,'' evoking her familiar metaphors of travel and navigation as she casts this bold ``little book'' into uncharted territory. The poems take the reader ``past the known world'' into a terra incognita where the boundaries of history, myth, geography and gender blur, transformed by Greger's distinctly modern American vision. And so we meet ``Persephone in the West,'' who has a ``flight to catch''; Ovid, a wigged transvestite at an off-season seaside convention; and movie icon Paul Newman. Even the natural world is displaced and let out of its element, as in ``Air-Conditioned Air,'' where ``Sea turtles lay their eggs / in the parking lots of hotels.'' Finally, Greger is concerned with the enduring rituals of love, death and desire and the necessary human effort of ``keeping the weedy world at bay.'' In fact, it is this ``weedy'' world and all its castaways that she celebrates with characteristic wit, irony and precision. (June)