Calendar Year

Evoking the year's seasons and its cycles, four sectioned, narrative poems fill this richly contoured, yet frustratingly oblique volume by Agoos (who won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for Above the Land). Agoos structures the first-person poems around images of the speaker's lonely, elderly father (whose brain damage is disclosed only towards the book's end) and ruminations on his landscape paintings of country settings strewn with abandoned houses and barns. A tactile and exacting style (""the swell of wordlessness, the fluid wound/ that pressed against the surface with no sound"") combines with Agoos's private symbology and overwrought storytelling to distance the reader. Only in ""Rumour,"" a hypnotic piece giving voice to the minor Greek deity (""I am attached to distance and the clear voice,/ the broken images of world and world""), does her narrative montage coalesce into a gratifying-and accessible-poetic whole. (Jan.)