God's Loud Hand: Poems

A multifaceted writer, Cherry ( My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers ) is difficult to classify. Her fiction is better written than her poetry, yet her poems in this collection have a lyrical rather than a narrative base. Despite the fact that Cherry speaks constantly of God and has a number of poems built around the life of Christ, her understanding of a higher power seems predominantly earth-bound: ``At night, God and I slept on our grassy beds, / He in one hut, and I in another.'' As in the Song of Songs, the lover addressed in these poems is at once mundane and divine. In short, there's nothing surprising in the poet's perceptions. Reading through the volume, one rushes toward the secular poems which fill the second half, only to discover these are even more cliched and intrusively rhymed: ``Into darkness, out of light / I plunged. Breathy in midlight, / I lost sight / of all below-- / there was no / bright crescendo. . . .'' A suite of short poems written to the music of an unnamed Soviet composer stands out in retrospect as the book at its finest, but even there mundanity is pervasive. (Mar.)