Thinking the World Visible

Several impulses are at war in this first book. Wohlfeld, a talented poet and winner of the 1994 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, establishes certain archetypes as significant for her: sea, moon, Eve, the body. When she writes of these using straightforward images, her verse is original and moving. In ``The Uccello'' she links Leonardo's interest in flight with the experience of the human embryo. In ``The Philosophy of Anatomy,'' one of her strongest poems, she etches imagery with simple language: ``Should I say of the heart: weed/rooted in lung?'' But in poems such as ``Partial Pages from a Guidebook of Travel to Be Found among the Lost Notes of Copernicus,'' the writer seems to eschew powerful compression as a strategy. The language veers toward the fantastic without making clear its meaning. Elsewhere, her reach for an exotic vocabulary undermines Wohlfeld's writing; her word placement can seem capricious. She finds a ``middle ground'' of rhetorical power in ``Sea'' and other poems. Wohlfeld's gifts are considerable; she will not be for long ``a fruit/ indiscernible to itself.'' (Sept.)