Fanatic Heart: Poems

In this distinctive first collection of poetry, Pope ( A Separate Vision: Isolation in Contemporary Women's Poetry ) posits similar concerns to those expressed in her critical work. ``The bulbs loll like doll / heads in their plastic mesh'' she writes, lines that run the gamut of her subject matter: children, death, winter and the garden (those flowers that will not grow and the pervasiveness of those which manage to bloom). ``There is something of every good-bye in this. / Somehow it is always winter, / there is snow at the curb, / the driveways are gray,'' she writes in a poem recalling her childhood. Uniquely structured, the book first shows the poet as a young mother, then reminiscing about childhood (spurred by her father's funeral) and finally thrust into a present filled with self and others. So deeply rooted are these poems in personal experience and emotion that when Pope describes a boy lost in the forest, or includes academic ``painting poems'' in the book's final section, we sense her haunting identification with the figures portrayed: ``Daughters, daughters / their father's tints whisper, holding / a moment more the light, the long / pause of their century's spring.'' (Sept.)