This feverish, dreamlike state is the climate of desire in ''Woodcuts of Women,'' and the stories explore it with language that is by turns jazzy, lyrical and impressionistic. This is Gilb's second book of stories. Some of the stories in ''Woodcuts of Women'' still make use of that voice, as in ''Maria de Covina,'' where a young store clerk is tempted and beguiled and finally undone by his female co-workers. Snow,'' which combines gorgeous descriptive passages with jarring plot shifts. Here a man from the Southwest appears without explanation on a plane to New York in pursuit of a woman.
Language simply overwhelms story line.
Other stories take a more straightforward approach. In ''A Painting in Santa Fe,'' a well-meaning but patronizing Anglo couple befriend a Chicano workman, whose anger at them builds along with the pile of brush he is trying to clear from their acreage. Such issues of ethnicity and class echo and refract throughout the book. The protagonist of ''Snow'' finds his true nature when his boss, meaning to insult him, calls him an Indian. In another story an Anglo woman treats her Mexican housesitter as both a sexual curiosity and a hedge against her own loneliness.