THE YELLOW HOTEL

"Informality was queen. King?" Wald asks near the middle of her smart new collection, and she goes on to establish its curious reign: the Bohemianism of her open-ended poems and sequences charts a middle course between Steinian cadences and the chattiness of second- or third-generation Beats. Long-lined, multi-page efforts (some bordering on the conversational prose poem) venture out into the world with explanations that hazily invoke the autobiographical ("I awoke with a backache because of all this dreaming and boating") then veer into abstract territory: "Everything has become/ what it least expected." Wald's longer works can feel less like discrete poems than like journals, but they are compelling, inventive journals, full of "Ideas in bed/ and how they fled." While the sequence "The Fear As the Height of Folly" offers exceptional examples of attention to each word, other work (including the four-page title poem) promises exactly the opposite, a casual propulsion attention (a la Bernadette Mayer) that renders ideas and images as they arrive. After decades of small-press and chapbook publishing (Wald's last collection, Lucid Suitcase, appeared from Red Hen in 1999), Wald offers not a debut so much as a comeback volume, and while she does participate in the jumpy humor common to much recent poets, she also acts out a kind of confidence that remains hers alone: "Why don't you/ set out to do what you must in your own world and not worry about the rest." Readers will find Wald lives up to this dictum wonderfully. (Nov.)