cover image The Dominion of Lights

The Dominion of Lights

Isabel Nathaniel. Copper Beech Press, $9.95 (62pp) ISBN 978-0-914278-69-6

Like the Impressionist concern for capturing light rather than the things lit, Nathaniel's focus is often the elusive, intangible background of individual experience, the moods and emotions that light or shade the elemental present. Grief and longing--for a dead son, for wishes past reaching--hang atmospheric in many poems. In ""Lost in the Forest Near Nacogdoches,"" the narrator observes berries being carried by a trail of ants across the forest floor: ""Are they not like/ sorrows we have accumulated/ in this life, each a luminary/ which we must carry with us/... more carefully than a piece of luck?"" In some poems, Nathaniel remains so aloof, and her intentions so encoded, that the reader can't help but feel a trespasser in emotional territory too private to be fully disclosed. She is most successful when she balances her offstage, private concerns with a particularity of foreground. When she casts her perceptive eye on her surroundings, particularly the various Texas settings, Nathaniel's poetry comes alive. In ""Sick at the Gulf"" and ""The Coast of Texas,"" both of which juxtapose the tumult in the speaker's ailing body with the tumult of landscape and history, she strikes strong chords on the taut, vibrating strings that link her to the wider world. (June)