In the Surgical Theatre

In poem after poem envisioning the porousness of the human body--breachable in sex, by food and bacteria, but also by angels at the moment of death--Levin writes a harrowing poetry that at times aspires to the unstable intensity of Sylvia Plath and the millennial resonance of Tony Kushner, but settles for ordinary morbidity in the manner of C. K. Williams or Sharon Olds. This second winner of the American Poetry Review's First Book Prize is divided into three parts, ""Body,"" ""Home"" and ""World."" Where ""Body"" gives Levin sanction to engage in an almost painterly obsession, recasting the same few images with mounting and incontrovertible anxiety, ""Home"" and ""World"" predictably engage their subjects--abusive siblings, decaying animal remains, Slobodan Milosevic--with not especially enlightening invective. ""Body,"" too, is problematic; ""Bathhouse, 1980"" seems to seek--""through Richard's eyes""--to capitalize on both the excitement and abandon of pre-AIDS sexuality and on the horror of plague, while subliminally taking a blame-the-victims tone. The indented lines outlining depression, exhaustion and scavenging are somewhat of an improvement on their mainly forgettable precursors, but the lack of variation, while flagged by contest judge Louise Gluck in the book's introduction as a hallmark of Levin's maturity, may also indicate a limit. Still, the talent that produced ""a roar of angels swarming over the body, burrowing headfirst into every pore"" may yet imagine new ways into all the subjects everybody thinks they know. (Sept.)