Ivory Cradle: Poems

Selected by Robert Creeley, this year's APR first book-award winner is an expertly crafted collection of reflective, chiaroscuro verse. Macari casts themes of family history, failed love and pregnancy and child-rearing with a darkness that haunts many of the poems while remaining deliberately unfocused, as in ""My Son and I See the Arms and Armor Exhibit"": ""I don't want to cross to a world where the sky/ is wet and cold and a knight rides from the woods/ just as thaw is reversing. I don't want to pity his body."" The book is divided into two parts, with many of the stronger poems belonging to the St. Francis-based latter section, where Macari's poems steel to face a deeper sense of loss: ""That's how you rise now from your chair,/ rise to your grief, your shining eyes on me,/ your hand pressing mine so I'm stunned by what I'm losing,/ what I've lost, stunned by how we go on..."" While able to impeccably, as well as unironically, work with highly charged imagery, Macari has a tendency to disguise the sincerity that is at the core of her poetry with a kind of awestruck tonal elevation that too often trivializes the subject at hand: ""who would not focus on what tore/ like hailstones at the roof,/ who would not admit it was all/ unfathomable. "" but which works for the more purely descriptive passages. This quiet, familiar book won't get a lot of attention, but Macari's poise and instinctive sense of a poem's shape betoken precise and measured follow-ups. (Nov.)