UNDERGROUND WITH THE ORIOLE

Lima, a former director of Phoenix House now associated with the Hispanic Association for a Drug-free Society, is also a fairly celebrated avant-garde poet (numerous prizes including the John Hay Whitney Award, and publications in the Paris Review and Art arm Literature). Not surprisingly, his poems lean toward the urban, its rawness and its shifts, his eye tracking the highly mobile images of the street and the mind, In fact there is such a general feeling of instability and such a profligacy of effect -- each line seeming to compete, pearls vs. swill, with all the others -- that one sometimes wonders if he ever revises. His results, in any case, mix the preternaturally good with the awful -- ""We think like diamonds in a glove"" with ""happy as a faggot in Boy's Town"" -- and the collection overall, while perversely fascinating, is considerably less impressive than some of its parts.