Vinegar Bone

This debut volume of tough, complex poems employs a unique blend of scary folktale imagery, American plain speech and a planed-down formalism in creating a indirect, cumulative portrait of a Vermont woman living alone in middle-age. Retrospective thoughts on marriage and raising a daughter provide the impetus for many of the poems, which then take off into the murky territory of self-reckoning. ""Death of the Air"" paradoxically begins hopefully: ""Are we short spells in our heads, or what?/ Tired out chasing, selves bed down./ Wind lays snow in skeins around,/ Tugs and overlaps, nest-building./ All night the covered shells mend"" and invites the sleeping town to ""Dream courtships/ in moonskins."" Poems about stars (""Here""; ""Blue Light""; ""Space Raptures"") make this oldest of genres yield fresh existential terror and charge. ""A Witch,"" ""Immaterial"" and ""Questioning the Sex Killer"" (""Anyway, he'd checked it out &/ it was what they'd suspected,/ women! --women just/ opened & spilled"") call on a second-wave feminist directness, and are infused with a capacious irony--and, elsewhere, eros--that undergirds the message. Like Alice Fulton (whose quirky phrases some lines recall), Zweig can be funny, as in the opening of ""Sick Day"": ""Mama, I came down/ pup-sick among the bureaucrats!""--or of ""Fidelity"": ""Little indeed to say about the sex part."" This debut, unlike so many others, arrives with purpose, force and clarity. (Feb.)