Giacometti's Dog

With a direct, unembellished narrative style, a voice at once reserved and passionate, Becker ( Backtalk ) uses shifting geographical and emotional landscapes to consider the complexities of love, loss and relationships. Throughout the collection, the coffey/if you can say narrator when talking of poems, please switch this to narrator/speak used below/pk speakerspeaker? persona? attempts to come to terms with the ghosts of friends and family members who haunt these pages; she seeks to ``learn the patience to live / alongside the dead who will not speak / and will not go away.'' For Becker, though the earth is ``a lonely place, miles from anywhere,'' consolation can be found in art, nature, human sexuality and ``faithfulness renewing itself / with each attention to one thing, and the next.'' She is at her best when using microscopic detail and apt particulars to magnify past and present moments and events, her poems quietly building to subtle, arresting epiphanies. But the book is uneven, as Becker's language and rhythms sometimes slacken, lapsing into the vague and prosaic. ( June )