Reviews

Kelly's debutthe 1987 Yale ``Younger Poets'' winneris of strange and uncommon character. Like Louise Gluck, Kelly has a talent for coaxing out the world's ghosts and then fixing them in personal landscapes of fear and uncertainty. She constructs a sort of mythology of the real, describing the Grimm's fairy tale we wake to everyday: the marriage that is ``a thing barely breathing/ . . . that could at any moment . . . fall to utter stillness,'' ``a sun which is pewter and cold as/ water.'' Smoothed by nuances of sound and rhythm, her poems exude an ambiguous wisdom, an acceptance of the sad magic that returns us constantly to the lives we might have led. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.