How Many More of Them Are You?

""Affronte tes maladies. Il faut les embracer."" A poet in her mid-20s, Lubasch writes with the intensity of a witness to the ""birth of consciousness"" in the classic late-19th-century sense. And, indeed, of the many echoes that resound in her debut volume, those of the most angst-ridden, defiant and uber-menschlich Europeans--Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Lautr amont, the ironist Laforgue--are the most apparent. The book is broken into six sections of short verse-sentences, each of which is a poem augmented by lengthier ""Notes"" and ""Leprosarium"" (these last comprise perhaps 80% of the work). Mostly apostrophic, with direct addresses to the reader, a lover or the powers that be, the poems approach being and consciousness with the irony-shucking fury of a new Promethean: ""O vile and sophisticated burglars of the night. These are all my incantations!/ Of the sun that searches out its prey, then buries it, I say `Deceptive sunlight! Implacable sidewalk! (Barren amour).' "" The effective use of white space and asterisks between such pronouncements and quieter, more meditative verse put Lubasch at a productive crossroads, one where the integrity of the fragment, and the continuities of lyric are simultaneously questioned. The result is a poetic identity shaken of its philosophical surety, and collapsed into a mundane, spiritually barren, visceral (read: erotic) existence, which counters all easy idealism (""the neat blue hills""). But the speaker, despite all the trepidation, seems desperate for real connection, and still believes it possible--""spur-winged, wagging, wagged/ into these words// poured out in rains, acred// urgings toward vergency."" It's a fraught ride that Lubasch provides, and one looks forward to what her future, already foretold as a minefield of possibilities, holds. (Oct.)