Red Signature

One of five winners of the 1996 National Poetry Series, Leader's first collection (chosen by Deborah Digges) impresses with its originality and its variety of forms and music. Her poems take many shapes, including that of a will and of a recipe. Leader's voice is spare, certain and contained. Sometimes she bends bits of Oklahoma vernacular to the shape of her verse, as in ""Doris Ann's Ash Street March"": ""Four old men on/ the one depot bench/ Miss Cassie Ellis in/ her black dotted swiss// Her with her hankerchiff/ them in straw hats."" The eye is also variously engaged, whether Leader bases a poem on an Edward Hopper painting or, as in the diamond-shaped ""Both,"" shapes her language on the page to render a visual experience as well as an aural one. The latter in its entirety reads: ""When/ Body inhales, soul/ Extends freezing palms; when body/ Exhales, soul folds palms on chest. End this/ Servant's life on an inhale: gesture/ Of grace, not/ Rest."" Although the volume's virtuoso gestures and experiments are nearly all entertaining, the best poems are those in which Leader marries her edgy verse to a known referent, as in ""Oklahoma Passover,"" in which a family hides in the cellar from a Great Plains twister the way the Israelites hid from the plagues God visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus. (Mar.)