Askance and Strangely: New and Selected Poems

Pennant ( Dream's Navel ) has published widely, and this welcome volume collects work from four previous books, as well as new poems. One of the poet's signatures is his wit. ``A shrub of tourists / gathers under `General Grant' / for the ranger's lecture,'' he observes in ``Thoughts Under the Giant Sequoia (Yosemite National Park),'' and ``the general has heard the talk before.'' But for Pennant, wit is often a means of earnest meditation, both in this poem--in part, about the overlooked in history--and elsewhere. Wit is also a gently corrective force, and an effective partner to Pennant's lyricism. That lyricism is outstanding in a poem like ``The Art of Dowsing,'' and in the author's other love poetry, which is filled with feeling, but not owned by it. Pennant's poetry seems owned, instead, by mind, as seen in such a work as ``The Geode,'' roaming from the immediate particulars of ``a crude ball of concretionary stone'' to thoughts on earthly and human evolution and, finally, to the night consciousness of two lovers left ``in the everglade of sweet subsidence.'' A writer of range and depth, Pennant has much to give to readers. (Dec.)