Earthquake Weather

Kleinzahler's ( Storm over Hackensack ) second collection is concerned with intimacy, effecting a montage of impressions to represent the speaker's specific experience. Immediate and striking, the poems here focus on momentary illumination or epiphany rather than re-creating a scene, often rendering their subjects elusive: ``Student nurses all in a row / waiting for apples and cakes: / their phonemes mix with air / and turn into a swarm of pink flies.'' Most potent are those poems in which a realized narrative framework supports concrete images. Discussing the endurance of friendships impeded by geographical distance (``the years apart, lives so different''), the poet remarks, ``So much of ourselves that we had forgotten / alive in them still / whose children fall asleep in our arms.'' Elsewhere, he demonstrates his gift for incisive description: ``night after night / cars sluicing into the tunnel below . . . / the West Side throbbing/across black water.'' (July)