A POCKET MIRROR

Precisely titled: the author of The Edge of the Alphabet and other prose-descriptions of a distinctive state of awareness, reflects in these 166 poems briefer, flashing glimpses of her private world. New Zealand is the locate, but the mind that perceives its farms, seas, foliage, people, sees from within outward. A delicate, shut-in's sense of strangeness, and violence, makes all objects remote yet immediate, brand-new but old in an inner knowledge which slips in and out, sometimes revelling in pure sensuous description, sometimes playing with nonsense words and limericks, often revealing in one crackling line a remarkable image or idea. Insights range from the bizarrely disjointed to a hard, exactly phrased wisdom. ""Reality,"" thus treated, takes on many overtones and other aspects, alternate truths: the power of language and private vision is reaffirmed in a personality that is both hidden and miraculously open to its world.