Another Language: Selected Poems

Part fragmentary confession, part rigorous philosophical inquiry, this collection brings more than 20 years of Waldrop's work, scattered among hard-to-find small-press editions, into clarifying relief. Widely known for her sharp translations of French poet Edmund Jabes, Waldrop has consistently worried over how the body gets caught up in language: ""mouthy dreams with fishing/ lines attached/ such fierce hope in a hook/ night crawls on."" The strength and energy of her recent prose poems stand out here, particularly in selections from The Reproduction of Profiles, a meditation on the visual language of perspectivism and portraiture, and in the gorgeous, propulsive and suggestive Lawn of Excluded Middle, which explores the entanglement of gender and language: ""Something that can be held in the mouth, deeply, like a darkness by someone blind or the empty space I place at the center of each poem to allow penetration."" Other experiments are less successful, like the work from 1992's A Key Into the Language of America, which appropriates Susan Howe's citational use of early American diction to diminished effect. But Waldrop, who has taught a generation of young language poets at Brown University (with her husband, Keith Waldrop), is a determined follower of the ways in which history and experience put the self in flux. (May)