The Land of Milk and Honey

In her debut collection (a selection of the James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series, edited by Richard Howard), Getty explores women's lives with deft intelligence and no sentimentality. ""That Woman"" is a graceful tribute to generational continuation: ""Even now, your daughter/ doesn't see you at her elbow as she walks/ the beach. There! a gull dips to the Pacific,/ and she points and says to the baby, `Look!'"" Many poems display an ironic, affectionate wit, as in ""Pocket Guide,"" addressed to a daughter: ""it's all I issued you, gear/ for your stay here...."" Getty illuminates the treacherous ballet of mother-daughter relationships in many guises. ""A Winter's Tale"" recasts the myth of Demeter and Persephone: ""Unknowing, my Mother makes/ the earth a place like this-for we are very much/ alike, I must admit...."" Getty handily twists the story of Sleeping Beauty in ""On Her Fifteenth Birthday,"" in which the speaker, Beauty's mother, is princess, grandmother and wicked fairy all at once: ""All those stories are hers now;/ my work is done, and she's undoing it, wrapping up/ her girlhood strand by strand... Dreaming."" In the title poem, a glittering synthesis of the entire collection, Dorothy of Oz clicks her heels in and out of an 1823 prairie town that spawned three generations of women who are joined for a moment in modern-day California as ""The Only Child leans back/ into my arms and I lean/ back in my mother's, home again. Rocking,/ we watch the west for omens unfolding in the gold."" (Nov.)