The spirit most felt in ["The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing"] is generous love, but love combined with scrutiny and even humor. Arranged around the seasons, the book moves from city life to a Cape Cod retreat and back again; its concerns are the difficult balances that result when love, self-regard and moral concerns clash and reveal themselves. Like Adrienne Rich and Robert Lowell, but quite distinct from either, she turns her ego into the theater of operations. Politics, domestic tranquility and discord, supportive nature and nurturing art: all are plain-spokenly addressed, with an almost casual sense of form. As she says, "Like the Golem I am makeshift, lumbering." But the artistic ease is more than offset by the emotional drive: "You want only half / of me and I, / I want to be whole." Sometimes the figures go on a bit too long, and a metaphor begins to gasp, splitting its force between the clarity of feeling and the curve of beauty:
a theme from Liszt
I cannot have heard since
I played it on the piano
at age seven: the sensuous honey
of melancholy veined
smoky with lust.
But there are times when the excess comes right, especially in the funny passages, as this arrival scene at an airport shows:
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