cover image As If

As If

James Richardson. Persea Books, $9.95 (78pp) ISBN 978-0-89255-171-2

A flock of starlings leveling in flight appears ``like a sheet of paper edge-on.'' The sound of a stone hurled through dry woods resembles ``deer on the move, or a straining chair.'' The poems of Richardson's ( Reservations ) collection--selected by Amy Clampitt for the National Poetry series--center on such instances of startling similitude, of imagination depicting things as if they were other things, hence the volume's title. This ``will to be surprised,'' this relentless recomposition of reality through perception uncovers the unusual at the heart of the ordinary yet also induces numbing vertigo.In ``In Our Elements'' the quintessen-tial shape-shifter--water--complains that ceaseless motion and change lead to a memoryless indifference and longing instead to be like land, ``cliffed and faulted . . . to hold.'' Richardson's best lines possess a halting, Dickinsonian quality (``To coax / a lash from the eye-- / slight is wary, / hard if hurried''), and his verb choices consistently fascinate: ``apples blued,'' sentences ``wilder.'' Occasional emotional flabbiness, therefore, stands out. ``Pity me that I can look on you and not die for pity, / that I am nothing you can believe.'' (Apr.)