As Earth Begins to End

Goedicke's scattered but passionate twelfth book anticipates her own and her husband's old age and death, laments the endangered global ecosystem and sometimes equates the planet's fate with their own: ""I've never been able to tell,"" the title poem admits, ""where we end and earth begins beyond us."" Goedicke's rapid and often lengthy lines, her frequent all-over-the-page stanzaic layouts and her abrupt tonal jumps suffuse her poems with a desperate, eclectic energy, one that counterpoints the poems' quotidian occasions--a shared meal, a shared bed, TV ""snow,"" a house cat. If her visual descriptions falter, she makes up for it with a superb understanding of pace and of breath: her arrangements of phrases, even single words, into tenuous verse-paragraphs often describe an attempt to draw lasting strength from some glimpsed symbol or happy moment. Goedicke's penchant for evocative abstractions can make her poems, and their titles, blur together: is ""What Holds Us Together"" only ""What the Dust Does,"" or does it include ""The Things I May Not Say""? And her associative enthusiasms can generate clich s and mixed metaphors: during a marital quarrel ""black golfballs run down the face as the house jackhammers ... into two poles staring across chasms."" But such imprecisions may be a worthwhile price to pay for the best of Goedicke's new work--for its desperation of last chances (""the random cha-cha of cells hacked/ into smaller metaphysical tatters""); for its strikingly juxtaposed, compact images, from gulls and oceans to skyscrapers and ""little cakes""; for its exploration of life's approaching endings, and of the energies we need to face them. (Jan.)