LOOKING UP AT LEAVES

The poems in this brief collection are arranged rather like strawberries in a basket; the top half ripe and good and most of the rest just a trifle green. The good first half of the poems have a lilt and sureness; the Caribbean wind, the death of a toucan, the risks of daylight...such unexpected subjects are given unexpected twists and are competently controlled. The poems of the second half are curiously flat by comparison, stretching out commonplace subjects (such as TV), without adding much in the way of fresh comment, though here, too, there are some good poems. The chief trouble with the lesser poems is a womanly rational-practical ordinariness, which is oddly at variance with the genuine poetic leap into the unanticipated, impersonal universals of the best poems.