Taken from the River: Poems

Moldaw's first book reveals a gentle yet entirely assured lyric delicacy and the tendency to evoke the ``signal image'' in poetry that can transform and transport. Her work is fleet, witty, sometimes even jazzy--and often startlingly graceful. The poems are like songs, songs with an undercurrent of moxie, and description is her strong suit. In ``Panoramic Way,'' for instance, ``Something knots in my throat. / Indecipherable / decibels begin jackhammering / inside #D--our old address'' as the narrator revisits the ``steep residential hill'' of her former Bay Area home. With irony and darting rhythmic precision, she surveys the past, still stitched into the present, and concludes, jauntily, with an image of fog as ``San Francisco / shrugging off her damp negligee.'' Moldaw enjoys subtle rhyme and other plays of verbal sound, using these to strike sensuous balances in the poems, which range in shape and weave from couplets to long, uninterrupted stanzas. However, regardless of the poetry's visual path, its self-containment is striking and elegant; one gets the sense of Moldaw as a draftswoman or a careful watercolorist, at home with her means and her manner. (Sept.)