HIV, Mon Amour

In What Silence Equals (1993), Dent took seriously the algebra of the AIDS activist group Act Up's slogan, confronting her HIV+ status and its then seeming death sentence with intellectual clarity and fierce despair. The title's play on the classic Duras novel and art film Hiroshima, Mon Amour prepares the reader at once for Dent's gothic narratives, and for her constant supply of cultural allusions. ""Fourteen Days in Quarantine"" leads the poet to supersaturate the poem with names: she sees the TB room as a Richard Serra sculpture and herself in her hospital gown as a Nan Goldin portrait; the view of the East River out her window reminds her of film noir; CNN and A&E offer a synthetic version of an interior life, while a shifting array of pharmaceuticals suggest the energetic confusion of the hope they hold out. Making a few escapes from the secure room, the poet comes back to ""the gut feeling [I] had always associated with the word `Tory', the specific/ white pine amidst the general landscape."" In poems dedicated to Marilyn Hacker, Sharon Olds and Adrienne Rich, among others, Dent reaches for a more obvious pathos. But in ""Cinema Verite"" she cuts from movie to movie, movingly cribbing material for a speech to her lover who has died in the epidemic. The title sequence contains the most annihilatingly subdued work in the book: ""Nothing, not the winter trees reduced to underbrush at this distance nor their moulin-like branches, so baleful, have conspired against you."" Chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa for this year's Academy of American Poets Laughlin award, Dent's second book records, unflinchingly, the mind's desperate clingings to life. (Nov.)