A Strange Heart: Poems

A keen observer of everyday life, Wayne fashions her poetry from universal, quotidian experiences. Trimming string beans at the kitchen table, hearing a distant conversation floating in through a window, feeling the anxiety of a hospital visit-these are the events Wayne plumbs. Though the poems are personal, she is not a confessional poet; instead, she fashions from her experiences delicate but sturdy constructions of metaphor and meaning. This approach is captured in ""The Navel Orange"": ""But this navel orange/ ...holds infinities of oranges,/ spheres within spheres,/ too small to contemplate,/ too grand to overlook."" The narrator of ""In Levelled Teaspoons"" is baking a cake: ""I crack the shells, separating whites/ from yolks, translucency/ from opacity, the living from the dead."" The poems have a graceful sense of pace and climax, while rhythms and internal half-rhymes provide a simple elegance. This collection, a second for the poet, is the winner of the publisher's 1995 Marianne Moore Poetry Prize, judged by James Tate. (Nov.)