cover image Inland

Inland

Pamela Alexander. University of Iowa Press, $16 (80pp) ISBN 978-0-87745-582-0

In ""Fogbow,"" the speaker witnesses a luminous ""concoction of light and obscurity"" in a bank of fog. The language in Alexander's third collection, winner of the 1996 Iowa Prize, demonstrates its own shrouded grace, pierced by sudden moments of clarity. As she did in her second book, Commonwealth of Wings, which recreated the life of John James Audobon, Inland explores, with a Nerudian simplicity and wit, the edgy relationship between humans and nature. Works range from joyous odes to animals like puffins (""tubby, mime-faced tumblers"") to the strange beauty of an artificial island ""composed of a century's rubbage,"" yet colored magnificently to ""stratum on stratum/ of rust, taupe, rose, mustard, cobalt, literal bottle-green!"" Alexander's most moving poems shunt along their own wild, whimsical sidetracks of natural imagery and emotional logic, as in the opening lines of ""Understory"": ""The hay scented. The cinnamon, the horsetail,/ the interrupted; maiden-hair, royal, ostrich, marsh!/ The sensitive. The walking. The/ resurrection! Ferns."" In another poem, a teacher adjures: "" `Inhabit yourself widely.' "" It's a lesson Alexander follows, by way of concise and punchy observations of the natural world. (May)