Birthplace with Buried Stones

"Surface air stretches into unseen filaments/ Gilding the windowpane,// The golden trumpet in a poor man's hands": this moment of unapologetic beauty is just one of many in the latest from the prolific Alexander (Raw Silk), whose passionate commitments%E2%80%94erotic, aesthetic, historical, and familial%E2%80%94connect the many places, on three continents, that have figured in her own life. Alexander grew up (and began to publish) in India, has traveled widely in Africa and Europe, and is now a professor at the City University of New York: Manhattan and the Indian city of Pune, Bryant Park and "Sarasvati Koop%E2%80%94// Well of mystic sky-water where swans/ Dip their throats and come out dreaming" all inform her concisely and confidently transcontinental free verse, whose clarity and sensibility might bring to mind Jane Hirshfield or Galway Kinnell. Alexander has won attention as a memoirist (Fault Lines), and her most intimate new lines are some of her best: "Press me to your ribs,/ Cup my left breast with its freckle,// Set your right hand to my throat./ The monsoon's in her room." Yet she also takes pains to see far beyond her own person, into the lives of the Romantic and contemporary poets (Agha Shahid Ali, Grace Paley, Novalis, Mirza Ghalib) whom she commemorates, and into the sacred, grim, wondrous and difficult sites of modern-day Israel-Palestine. (Dec.)