Mad River

Although much of the emotional landscape traversed in this collection seems too familiar, Beatty does offer deeply visceral and sensory work, especially in the second and third sections of this three-part book. In these latter poems, mainly about sexuality (adolescent and adult), she risks relative boldness and deep emotional commitment, disregarding political correctness in respect for this less readily sanitized realm of experience. In ``Saving the Crippled Boy,'' she recalls kissing a one-armed classmate on the bus home from a tenth-grade field trip: ``... but now I was saying, Look,/ this is what you can't have, not for real,/ this is for today.'' An overall flat, confessional tone asks more of a reader's patience than the poems generally earn, yet Beatty demonstrates promise, particularly in the poems about sexuality and those about her father and his illness. (Sept.)