The Rim Benders (Poems and Discourses)
by Lola Haskins,
Anhinga Press, $12.00, paper 
ISBN: 0-mdash;70-4

here's a piano that refuses to stay out of this collection, and its overtones permeate the entire volume, all the way to its admirable white spaces.

A reader opening Haskins' sixth published book (which includes a number of prize-winning poems) is entitled to look for professional work, and this one more than fulfills every expectation. Lean, spare, precise, and delicate, no poem takes up more than a single page, and not one could have been left out. The same can be said of the lines.

There is a brilliance of closure in these poems that warns against an attempt to read them aloud, lest a catch in the throat betray a sensitive reader's spontaneous and irrepressible response to the difference between the tragic or the deeply empathetic, and the merely sentimental.

Image and metaphor here range from the forgivably predictable to quantum leaps of surprise and wonder; from a sensitive compassion for the outcast and the overlooked, to streaks of wicked humor.

Tiny vignettes, such as:

 Youth

For a student sitting under a noon tree 
A bright band circles your wrist
because it has fallen off your hair
which, slippery as black water,
would not be stayed

share space, in a handsomely-structured format, with explosions of imagination in lines like:

For the hooting taxis
that don't give a damn whose door they crunch. For the Levis
of New York City, out at the knees 
, , , 

For the jittery innocence under the skins of rivers the clear
way they skip over rocks as though the rocks' indigestibility
were of no importance

(From "For")

and

Against gaud, the poet who slings words like drops of water
the way a dog shakes his fur, who slings so hard even fleas spin out
Against this: the dog who slings off all that is not-dog

(from "Against")

This is a book about life, both lived and observed, from an intimate knowledge of birds at dawn "before their wings can be told / from leaves" to the treachery of shoes growing old too soon, and a mother not soon enough, the celebrations and outrages of marriage. One longs to know this poet, to share her wise communion with whatever is alive, in all its manifestations.

It's rare to find a collection in which every poem demonstrates a purity of control that never crystallizes into rigidity, but this one makes it. The major difficulty in praising these poems is not to fall overboard and quote them all, but something ought to be left for the reader's own excitement of discovery.

In short, if "less is more," as we are currently advised in every workshop in the land, Haskins' work should be a text for every aspiring wordsmith.

Her own modest statement, in "Winnowing the True":

 A jeweler will cut the extra face and risk the gem.
 A Master will tell you he plays, a little.

© Sandy McKinney