Leaving Eden: Poems

In her fourth collection, coming after Before We Were Strangers (1989), Aisenberg faces with resilient fortitude an apparently discouraging world. It is dark in many spheres: global--``And in the Plaza Mayor children without surnames/ rove like packrats searching for a granary''; and, in ``Widow,'' personal--``The terror is One by one./ As in You go and I stay.'' Under her unflinching gaze, promise fades: ``...accomodations's/ cracks appear. I would scour our very lives from here,/ move to a place I haven't failed in yet.'' Yet, endurance and love provide comfort, as in pairs of matched poems, ``Middle-aged love song, I'' and ``II'' and ``More and more'' and ``Less and less.'' ``My love, I promise. It will take less and less to console us.'' Flashes of humor lighten her verse: ``All those years/ of me in my tutus,/ you on trapeze,/ hardly helped at all./ Here we are,/ still out of balance.'' Many poems manifest her interest in other arts and display a voice that is supple and multifarious--elegiac, nostalgic, defiant, pastoral. Yet her stance is consistent: ``We pass through the bazaar hearing/ the soft moan of the world mourning itself./ We are always and continually leaving Eden.'' (Jan.)