Singing Yet

A collection of new and previously published poems by the winner of the Academy of American Poets Edgar Allan Poe Award offers generous selections from the poet's three previous collections.

Rice, a low-profile West Coast poet with three small-press books to his name, has now published this volume of new and selected poems with a major New York house. His first book in nine years, it may well expand the audience for his intense, painfully bright poems, which often recall Roethke: "Jane was my jam/ The movement of fish/ fleshed out her dress." While Rice often exhibits a dry wit, his work is dead serious. The bruised center of this collection is the death of a young daughter from leukemia, a loss that is dealt with directly in the selections from White Boy (Mudra, 1975) and Some Lamb (Figures, 1975) and that continues to surface in many later poems. Indeed, one sometimes fears that the poet's concentration was irrevocably shattered by the event. But in the newer poems--the quietly moving "Walking with My Son to the Creek in the Dark Which He Fears" or the coldy humorous "Icy Gravy" ("I have seen the ladle/ rise and fall/ from the icy cradle")--Rice seems to have marshaled his powers again. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib . , New York
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