THE WOMAN WHO LOVED WORMS And Other Poems

The author tries so hard to sound like Sylvia Plath (""And from the steel-precision hospital, a Wermacht band,/ I smartly marched, oompah. . . pah, Zieg Hell,/ into Third Reichs of my childhood. Ya!"") that what is no doubt the genuine anguish of these poems only sounds mechanical exercises in hate towards parents, priests, doctors, men in general. Most of the poems are merely successions of ugly, obsessive images (people as vegetables, people as airplanes, intercourse as depositing money in banks), moving nowhere, revealing not so much a vision of horror as a talent for ugly (but no longer shocking) metaphors. Toward the end of the book, however, in poems that try to enter other people's existences (""Baal Shem Tiv""; ""Mrs. Maldonado's Daughter"") and particularly in the beautifully moving ""Space Cage Poem II,"" possibilities of quiet worlds appear. Here the author not so much looks for answers as attempts to find the proper questions.