LADY OF THE BEASTS

The author of Monster (1972) has a certain reputation as a feminist thinker and poet, in that order. But once again she sounds less like an angry contemporary than a high-strung bluestocking of the last century. Words--and Morgan uses masses of them--are less a medium of expression than a long, rocky road that must be traversed on the way to some elusive message. And, in an apparent bid for importance, there's no subject that isn't enhanced with references to the Albigensians, Blake and Lao Tse, the Delphic Oracle, etc. Morgan is most at ease with cerebral themes, such as her pre-Christian reinterpretation of the Cluny tapestries, but neither the unicorn, there, nor Pat Nixon, in a poem ""On the Women of Watergate,"" is ever more than a poor cipher for some inchoate idea--some ""cacophony of thought already massing in my brain,"" to use Morgan's own phrase--that she can't quite get hold of, at least not here.