As a reminder of Lowell's work, we offer the last lines of "For the Union Dead":

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

True Love, by Belle Randall (Wood Works $9)
This series of 27 sonnets looks at love as grape and as raisin (Ms. Randall's apt image.) Her explorations of true love result in a poem named "Sex in Long Marriage"; in another poem, sex is, "a dancer in the costume of an ape." And she knows love is not always sex, not when age and familiarity set in. Her poem Rest begins, "What urge was this -- turning apart / to sleep? The tangled business of sleeping together / getting down to the business of serious sleep." Ms. Randall has a fine facility with language -- is she the first to rhyme "chattel" with "Seattle"? -- so fine that the meaning and soul of these poems are not subsumed by the form. A wonderful addition to the Wood Works series of handmade chapbooks.

Report from a Town Under Siege, by Zbigniew Herbert translated from Polish by Buguslaw Rostworowski
& Give Me Back My Rags by Vasko Popa translated from Serbo-Croat by Charles Simic (Trace $8 each)
Two chapbooks, published in 1984 & 1985 respectively, we happily have picked up again in quantity. Mr. Herbert's poem begins, "Too old to bear arms and fight like other -- // I have been kindly assigned the inferior role of chronicler," and what follows is the chronicle of a nameless siege, told with deliciously grim humor: "Monday: the shops are empty rats have become the legal tender." Mr. Popa's poem is one of outrage in the extreme. The piece is addressed to a "you" who has taken the speaker's rags, asks to be carried piggyback, and that they "love each other." The speaker responds with nothing but vitriol. "Damn your root blood and crown / And everything else in your life // Every dried up image in your brain / Every shifty eye burning on your fingertips / And every step you take // May you sink into three kettles of grumpy water." It's great fun, in our make-nice culture, to indulge in such wild and humorous rage.

One-Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader (Storyline Press $18.95)
George Hitchcock is well known as the founder and editor of kayak, a lively and ground-breaking literary magazine he published for 20 years. But he is also a poet, fiction writer, and dramatist, and it is a pleasure to at last have a generous gathering of his work. Mr. Hitchcock championed the surreal and the political in kayak, and both certainly surface in his own work, as well as the gently spare and the humorous. "All that winter you were gone," he writes, "the skylarks went on crutches." A fine essay by Philip Levine opens the collection, which also includes found poems, interviews, reprints of some of the infamous kayak rejection slips, a transcript of Mr. Hitchcock's 1957 testimony before the Committee on Un-American Activities, and Robert Bly's "attack" on kayak, solicited by Hitchcock and published in the magazine.

Sparrow by Carol Muske-Dukes (Random House $22.95)
Ms. Muske-Dukes's seventh collection is a coolly elegant and movingly open portrait of love and grief. The widow of the actor David Dukes, who died unexpectedly on location, she writes of the transformation she has undergone: "A new person, I connect hope & despair: / I connect nothing with nothing." Many of the poems probe what it means to be an actor and an actor's mate: "When you crossed under / the arc of the proscenium, you were already dead // to me, yet more alive than ever."

Exercises in Lip Pointing by Annharte (New Star $16)
Vancouver writer, educator, and performance artist Annharte is Anishabe (Little Saskatchewan First Nations, Manitoba). In her third book she offers sometimes fractured and edgy, sometimes plain and gentle poems that explore race and gender, loss and power, with skill, humor, and fearlessness. In "Geriatric Canoe Princess," she writes, "jump in my canoe / never mind sea bus / you don't have time / trouble times we are all legend / if we know it or not / when we go by canoe / we remember to remember / we are remembered."