Poets and Poetry.(Starred Wire, A Word Like Fire: Selected Poems, by Dick Barnes, Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt, A Poet's Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan)(Book Review)

Starred Wire, by Ange Mlinko (Coffee House; $15). Mlinko has said that she prefers her poems "layered and loaded up," and, in her second book, lines like "Freezing the rapidly flowing global language into spun sugar gardens" show you exactly what she's talking about. Thick with knotty words and bizarre juxtapositions, these poems dissolve syntax and estrange language from conventional meaning. Some passages recall Surrealist forebears--"Schoolkids jumping the jellyfish fences / Wearing cranberry jackets / Through the paisley briars and stars"--and poems such as "Bon Nuit, Bunny" create charming, musical repetitions. Mlinko's most obvious influence is the conversational, paratactic style of Frank O'Hara, but her intoxicating, cerebral poems display a unique sense of humor and mystery.

A Word Like Fire: Selected Poems, by Dick Barnes, edited by Robert Mezey (Handsel; $17). There are no unnecessary words in these poems, and no unnecessary poems in this book. Barnes, who died in 2000, at the age of sixty-eight, seems to have written a poem only when he had something to say. The occasions are mostly personal and local, the personal being, often, skirmishes and truces in the war between men and women, and the local being the "other" Southern California--the mountains and the desert east of Los Angeles. This is where Barnes grew up, and where he spent his career, teaching at Pomona College. The poems are lightly spiced with mysticism, though mysticism in the way of the Beats--an honest man's recognition that the world is a little weird. What makes them extraordinary is something else: the naturalness of the voice, a vocabulary and a tone so "spoken" that the minute you finish a poem you want to read it again, just to see how he did it.

Love, Amy: The Selected ...