SLOW WORK THROUGH SAND

Since winning the Yale Younger Poetry Award in 1979, this Univ. of Texas (El Paso) professor has continued to write about a world of color and stone. But there's nothing vibrant or lapidary to her verse: ""Lapis Lazuli,"" ""Onyx,"" and ""Amethyst"" turn inward to the poet, who laments her failed loves and her aging, even as she celebrates her wildness, her looseness, and her spontaneity. Nature is refracted through self--so is tragic history in ""The Way Animals Are""--and Ullman prays to the deserts, mountains, and lakes in the landscape of her life. Disparaging her early work for its ""art-glass"" intellectualism, Ullman now embraces, in a series of poems, her horses, for their animal love. ""Estrogen"" and ""Passage"" lament the denial of her Jewishness in youth, and her lost ""prettiness"" in the present. Without the ambitions of girlhood (""Ambition""), Ullman forms her ""slow tongue"" into forgettable poems.