From the Bones Out (James Dickey Contemporary Poetry)

"My lover tells me I am like this place./ I tell him what I miss: the slap of leaves/ on skin and air that's like a damp embrace." The poems of this debut have a Cinderella-like innocence, transforming ugliness into beauty and waving the wand of well-crafted metaphor over all they encounter. The horrific suicide of a grandfather, a mother's cancer, the mourning for a stillborn child, the potential foreclosure of a neighbor's farm are all recounted with a refined clarity. Yet through it all, de los Santos manages to frame life's traumas with a voice that can seem borrowed from the Stage Manager in Our Town: "Some years/ were fair, but most were bad./ The taxes, worse than weevil, tried/ to take each dime she had." However, there are also poems, such as "Io's Gift," that evoke, through their subtlety and sensuality, the pleasures of the ever-changing consciousness of the female body: "I learned myself, bit/ by bit, or maybe I/ should say I dawned/ upon myself, a slow dawning." There are also glamorous poems, including "Supermodel," and "Perfect Dress," in which the poet indulges in herself as an object of perfect beauty: "Someone will murmur,/ `She is sublime,'/ will be precisely right, and I will step,/ with incandescent shoulders,/ into my perfect evening." In its worked simplicity, this is a first book that offers a formula of hope and clarity when confronting life's trials and tribulations. (Apr.)

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