Dying for Beauty: Poems

With its three serial poems and a longish Whitmanic invocation, Wronsky's (Again the Gemini Are in the Orchard) third collection has the intimate pace and feel of a group of chapbooks brought together for larger-scale publication. The opening long poem, ""The Earth as Desdemona,"" comprises roughly half of the collection, and tracks its contemporized, multiplicitous subject from one January 24 to ""almost Christmas."" At its best, the diction and observations come together seamlessly, showing us our (gendered) vulnerabilities in living among each other: ""Because you can't hide the thing./ You can't cover it with your hands./ Anybody walking by on the street/ could punch it, if they wanted to.// A fingernail could unleash it all,/ open you like a rice sack."" Anecdotes about the desperate devices of neighbors and strangers, observations of local nature and ""the very organization of language,"" and self-doubt are all clearly and movingly compressed into the poet's declarative shorthand. At the end, ""Desdemona, now living in Skandia, Michigan,"" pens a chatty letter about flowers, summer, salads, wildlife. In the margin she notes ""These/ are the limits of the figurative."" ""Little Dissertation on the Subject/Object"" (part of ""The World as Hieroglyph"") opens on a woman modeling for a male painter, but soon inquires into the model's own paintings. If this and the incantatory Whitman poem aren't as successful as ""Desdemona"" (which has its own precious points as well), Wronsky's ambition and willingness to fail make even her more familiar tactics fresh. In ""Sor Juana's Last Dream"" the 17th century nun, silenced by her church, finds ""hieroglyphs in the clouds."" She stakes her claim as ""the mother/ of syllables"" and the ""seer/ of all signs""--but only in privacy and depression: ""I'll leave you my bundle: my nightmare,"" she concludes. ""You may read it."" (June)