Faultdancing

The ponderousness with which Root invests his poems is rarely justified. Witness this epilogue, which could be a parody of solemn self-congratulation: ""Dry words/are for building/ on dry sand./ Who would build/ a house upon the rock/ must leave/the mountain quarry/ and learn to gather boulders from the air.'' Some poems, descriptions of Western landscapes or wild animals, seem to have no point other than to establish an atmosphere. A piece about a swallow trapped in a glass house is familiar and pedestrian, as is one about the opening of the hunting season, ``where the innocent are stalked by the justified.'' A long bad dream (``Fireclock'') and a trip to Mexico (``The Anonymous Welcome'') wind up as little more than shaggy-dog poems. The writer appears to have a vocabulary of received ideas about the beauty and terror of life that he is searching intently for poems to fulfill, but the poems do not stand by themselves. (March)