Happy Family

Shore continues her exploration of her Jewish heritage, her parents, her difficult middle-class childhood and her later life history in this fourth collection of poems. The adult Shore recalls the young Jane asking a rabbi about Jesus in ""The Second Coming""; recalls her aunt Flossie's once-captivating book of dirty jokes in ""Over Sexteen""; considers her daughter's dolls in ""`American Girls'""; and contrasts her younger and older selves in a complex two-part poem called ""Next Day,"" an answer to Randall Jarrell's poem of that name. As in Shore's previous work, arguments, transitions, phrasings and line breaks frequently seem modeled very closely and accurately on Robert Lowell's Life Studies: Shore, still, wants to adopt for her own autobiographical verse the strained, irregular, anti-heroic forms Lowell invented for his own. The results can be moving or witty; the title poem's Chinese-restaurant dish, a ""marriage of meat and fish, crab and chicken,"" inspires the quip, ""Not all Happy Families are alike."" Often, though, Shore sounds self-important, or flat: ""Even as [Shore's mother] was dying,/ she shut me out, preferring to be alone."" After a Catholic babysitter's cigarette ashes blew into the young Shore's eyes, Shore tells us that she cried ""tears like burning rain.... Since then, I often confuse revelation and pain."" Shore comes across as believable when describing in verse her experiences of growing up, having a child, and growing older; once such self-knowledge and frankness (especially in sexual matters) inspired readers (and accomplished novel political work). But Shore's own generation of poets has made the life passages she describes a regular and plentifully covered field of American poetry; her honesty no longer seems enough. (Sept.)