Among Women

The deliberate poems in Shinder's second volume of verse concentrate on masculinity, love and hetero sex accordingly they are also interested in embarrassment; in fathers, sons and families; in men's ideas about women; in self-discovery; and in self-inculpation. The poems' quiet language, slow pace and emotional pitch, like their short-lined, triadic stanzas, will remind many readers of Stephen Dunn's verse, and perhaps of Raymond Carver's. Those writers' fans may appreciate Shinder's frankness: ""I'm afraid/ if I come/ I'll sound like someone// I don't know,"" he begins one poem; the next asks ""Oh God of paradise,// whom/ have I ever loved/ except through me?"" Some poems vouchsafe epiphanies; other chronicle absurd and touching sexual failures. Other still ask questions about love: ""Have we ever arrived// in the arms of someone/ who wasn't lost/ from the start?"" The deliberate clarity and accessibility tend toward stabs at Carver-esque profundity, and the results are often boring, and on occasion silly: ""Ocean. Irene.// We are ocean./ Night. Irene./ We are night."" Brought together from magazine publication, the poems seem here to be too much like one another, and too restricted in their forms and tones, to back up the best of the lot. While pitched as an antidote to the insistent (if now somewhat muted or ironized) chest-beating of most male-centered narrative verse, the poems end up bolstering the very categories they seek to question. (Apr.) Forecast: Shinder is the founder and director of the YMCA National Writer's Voice, director of the Sundance Institute's writing program, a writing teacher at Bennington College and New School University, and an indefatigable anthologist (he is series editor of the Best American Movie Writing and of a series of Harcourt collections of family poems) so this book should reach a variety of readers interested in his work.