In Primary Light: Poems

``In primary light things are clarified; / knowledge is optic and immediate, / so obvious its utterance is commonplace.'' Wood ( Orbs ), who has also written several nonfiction books on photography, is here most convincing in writing of the commonplace and our ways of perceiving it; his language is primary, precise, and sometimes rollickingly humorous. In ``Here in Louisiana'' he casts an eye on the comings and goings of cockroaches, and his observations are accurately humid, striking a balance between the gross and the lyric. Similarly, ``Shitheads'' takes the measure of confident mammon, of men who need ``carphone, Rolex, deodorant . . .Masonic handshakes,'' and who maul ``by their appetites.'' Wood knows them well enough to evokes but not patronize. Trouble comes, though, when rapture intercedes as an emotion and a literary motive: it leads the poet into overwriting that imposes distance between the poetry and the primariness of his experience. In one poem, for instance, Wood describes Maine summer light as ``broad and bronzing'' in its ``lemon pungence, brazen / and honeyed, full as wheat and amber's / wide ranging.'' By the time these and other qualifying descriptions conclude with the ``gloried and lambent joy'' that light and time can inspire, the excess seems rococo and several times removed from the eye. This volume is a winner of the 1993 Iowa Poetry Prize. (May)