What It Wasn't (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series)
Kasischke's fourth and fifth collections return to accustomed  themes frustrated domesticity, nostalgia, motherhood,  marriage leaping from personal anecdote to fairy tale to  biblical or Greco-Roman myth with astonishing speed and no small  dose of melodrama. At times reminiscent of Sexton, but without  the bravura, Kasischke's women are often ghostly, haunted and  haunting: "That girl over there, she's/ pale an exhalation a  girl/ you pass through like Nebraska/ on a white-washed day."  The poems often glide on wry asides ("Who can tell the  difference between the state/ of grace and the state of  inebriation?") or alight on prosey detail: "Once, lying naked/  beside my husband in a sweaty/ bed, an awful/ moth flew through  the window/ and landed on my breast." As with Kasischke's  strongest collection, Fire & Flower, these two books reveal a  troubled relationship between a speaker and her body: a thwarted  sexuality, an obsession with food and alcohol, a longing for  physical transformation. Myth and magic (including full-blown  Ovidian metamorphosis) can sometimes rescue a poem from  self-pity, but can also catapult it toward the ridiculous, as  when a dead bird carries a "message" in a poem about trying to  quit smoking, or when a friend's drunken mother is remembered as  having "poled/ us to morning on a ferry, dark/ and slow against  the current, ghost-/ white and floating/ up the Nile all  night...." While the poems of Dance succeed more often, the two  collections are quite similar in tone, subject matter and  associative structure. (June)  Forecast: Kasischke teaches at Western Michigan University and  has published three novels, mostly recently The Life Before Her  Eyes from Harcourt. Warm reviews of the novel have stressed  Kasischke's poetic language and explicitly mentioned her poetry;  shelving these collections next to it should boost sales  significantly.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.