cover image Stained Glass: Poems

Stained Glass: Poems

Rosanna Warren. W. W. Norton & Company, $17.95 (68pp) ISBN 978-0-393-03486-8

Warren's ( Each Leaf Shines Separate ) second book covers a broad formal range, though a rather narrow emotional one. The most powerful material is personal, like the work of mourning in ``From New Hampshire,'' in which the poet imagines an absent, familiar figure--``I think you have taken a long late evening walk / Your heavy shoes glisten with dew / I hear your footsteps pause on the dirt road / and I know you are picking out / the dark mass of the sleeping mountain from the dark / mass of night and testing the heaviness of each.'' However, her many poems triggered by literature, photographs or historical figures are distanced, not experienced. For example, ``Child Model,'' about a picture of an Eskimo child mummy, and ``The Cost,'' about a baby found in a trash can (``The cost of empire is great and disturbing / the secret knowledge of philosophy'') achieve sympathy, not empathy. As Warren writes in a memorable line, ``It is not distance / we're after, but clarity.'' Her technical abilities join with an emotional tautness in ``The Cormorant'': ``. . . ocean, old blowhard, wheezing in the give / and take, gulls grieving the battered shore. / It is your death I can't believe, / last night, inland, away from us, beyond/these drawling compensations of the moon.'' (May)