Summer Poem

``But her lovemaking with Alex--how can she describe it, how does one find words? Not even poetry can do it.'' Unfortunately, debut novelist Hayes gives it a try, churning her heartfelt and cleverly plotted tale of a middle-aged woman's reawakening of passion into a frothy near-parody. On the ferry from England to France, where she is rushing to console her elder daughter, whose husband has run away with her younger sister, 58-year-old Hester, a poet and widow, runs into Alex, whose lovemaking eight years back while she was still married--as shown in one of the narrative's several flashbacks--caused her to glow ``like a miniature nuclear reactor.'' This encounter, as well as Hester's fling with a French cafe-owner and her grappling with her daughters' problems, causes her to recognize some hard truths about her marriage and the nature of love. And all along, memories of her affair with Alex, of how ``the passion they had held back was free to crash and break over the rocks of their newfound love, and the more the waves pounded them, the more enduringly these rocks stood'' tug at her heart--right up to the ending that most readers, or at least those who can withstand the author's schmaltz, will be hoping for. (May)