Yonder: Life on the Far Side of Change

``I'm disappearing . . . . Everyone disappeared, and no one notices,'' Corder writes in a fragmentary monologue that focuses relentlessly on the permanence of change. His dirt-poor West Texas upbringing, a failed marriage, mental collapse, his inability to fit into ``WASP culture'' and his emotional withdrawal from his three children form the autobiographical bedrock for a wide-ranging meditation that links Americans' ``perpetual nostalgia'' to the wrenching dislocations of the Depression, World War II, the Holocaust and the computer age. Mortality confronts the writer everywhere--on vacations from his post as a professor of English at Texas Christian University, while gardening and in sifting through novels and poems for clues to his place in the scheme of things. ``We're always provisional,'' he declares. Charged with visceral intensity, Corder's lyrical reminiscence conveys a sense of the personal narratives each of us constructs to give shape and meaning to our lives. (Aug.)