Another Woman Who Looks Like Me

It is Lyn Lifshin's gift to seem perfectly artless, to make poems of immediacy and power from the humblest of near-to-hand materials. In this, her third collection to be published by Black Sparrow, her themes are those of classic lyric poetry -- the innocence of childhood, the ecstasy of lovemaking, the mystery of death -- and her word choices are the poetic equivalents of the artist's circles, squares, and primary colors. Just as Alexander Calder could make a lion out of a coat hanger, Lyn Lifshin can make something memorable out of even the most familiar nouns -- mother, daughter, wind, moon, lover, horses, roses. Something memorable, "something sexy ... and entirely her own" (San Francisco Review of Books).