The Difficult Wheel: Poems

The third section of Adcock's (Beholdings) fourth collection contains several impressive poems. Gently, determined not to disturb those sleeping, she confronts ""the whole past/ it was so terribly important that we lose."" In ""In a Trunk Not Looked Into for Twenty Years,"" redbud seeds saved by her father bring to mind his painterly eye. In ``The New South'' the poet draws past and present together, contrasting the ancestral quilts handed down in her family, both kept and used, with the antique quilts her friends buy to hang on their walls. Poems in the first two sections seem shallower, less sharply focussed and thought through, with the exception of poems in which the poet identifies with animals-the white rhinoceros caged in a supposedly life-like environment, and the mule: ``Born canceled, he works and balks,/ angry always in the muscle of his unknowing/ himself his only tribe, and that one going.'' (Oct.)