This Sharpening

Watson's fiery third effort offers a rare combination: the propulsive rawness of performance poetry and the pathos of impending middle age. These insistent, not-quite-narrative poems describe the daughter she loves, the husband she leaves and the dangerous world through which she moves, where "a child needing new lungs / waits for another child to die." Individual lines can sound direct—"Newly in my body, blind to the lie at the core / I toy with forbidden self"—when the poems that contain them remain evasive and hard to pin down. Poems about motherhood, and divorce, paint a picture of a world both fragile and precariously coherent: to her ex, Watson (Ladder Music , 2001) writes, "I'm ashamed / we failed at forever"; about a newborn, she says, "Today is the first day everything about her / is my job." The political poems dominating the volume's close perhaps take on predictable targets ("The President // who doesn't know how to be sorry") though they do so with ferocity and confidence in the belief that the personal has always been political. The effective rapidity of these lines does deprive some poems of depth. On the whole, though, Watson's accessible subjects and clear phrasing should draw readers to her work. (June)