Title: HARMONIOUS WHOLE
Author: Susan Baran
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, New York

It should be obvious to anyone from a brief glance at these poems that Baran has got form down. Anyone who can say something serious and witty about the position (or lack of position) of women in art history in the utterly arbitrary form of the pantoum earns my lasting admiration. The poem in question-"A survey"-is a virtuoso piece, but her skills are less obtrusively apparent in all the poems. Her seeming casualness, her concern with the details of daily life (a breakdown in a downpour, the Mets on TV, sodden shoes drying on a porch) is deceptive. She will talk of "fat bees/too involved to do us harm," and then ask "what attracts/ us to these scenarios with our words/ and paints?" In her world the actuality of things is shadowed by uncertainty and threat. Family heirlooms entirely fails to offer consolation; they are "silent lamentations" from whose "elegance and history" she has to break free. Baran's voice is quite but its intense lyricism is not to be denied: in a photograph of her mother she sees "the dark beacon of her hair calling us home." This is what I require of a poem: the image is gorgeous and surprising but it is earned by a humble devotion to craft, and it rings true.

John Ash