Dead, Dinner, or Naked

The concept of this volume is intriguing: middle-aged eroticism. A woman who considers herself to be middle-aged listens to her aging, sleeping husband gasping for breath and remembers listening similarly beside her infant's crib. At 40, she permits cups of coffee with a strange man to substitute for clandestine sexual encounters; she ``used to think / that any man who beckoned / I would follow, but now I know / I'm more ambivalent. You might say, / more scared.'' But Zimroth's ( Giselle Considers Her Future ) conception far outshines her poetic abilities, and too often whole poems seem trite, such as one about talking to a man while ``each part of my body turns to verb.'' Secondary themes--life in New York City, the adult returning to childhood haunts, the Holocaust and variations on biblical stories--fare no better. Even a four-page poem about the death of a child fails to be moving. In the book's final pages there is an undercurrent of irony, a sense that the poet has chosen hackneyed imagery to create a purposeful tongue-in-cheek stance, but if this is the case, she lacks the language skills to bring it off successfully. (Mar.)