Hats off, first of all, to Signature Books for maintaining its commitment to publishing poetry by Mormon women. Previous volumes in this (unofficial) series include Kathy Evans's Imagination Comes to Breakfast, Linda Sillitoe's Crazy for Living, and Emma Lou Thayne's Things Happen: Poems of Survival. [If I mixed up any of those someone please correct me; I'm composing this on campus and don't have my books handy.] I understand that Signature will be publishing a collection soon by Marni Asplund-Campbell, another fine poet from a post-Harvest generation.

Lisa Bickmore defies the easy categories Mormon critics are sometimes quick to apply. In a way, very little she writes couldn't be classified as "Home Literature," although not always in the ways critics have applied that term. Bickmore is not interested in dogmatism, less in didacticism. She's not out to strengthen your testimony or make you feel proud to be Mormon. But she's no member of an overt "Lost Generation" -- not even a "Lost Generation X," at least not in the words she gives us. She's as little interested in making Mormonism quaint or discrediting it as she is putting on a missionary's name tag. As far as her poems are concerned, Mormonism isn't, and it is. It hovers in her margins and pokes out between -- but never more important than -- words: a sensibility, in Susan Howe's terms.

When I say her poems might be called "Home Literature," I mean two things: First, they are interested in domestic space, domestic lives. In "Happiness" she writes about "the baby's head turned away from you; / Her every breath under the quilts lifting them // With a shudder, then a sigh." In "Love's Body" we find a newborn daughter clothed in "tiny garments that obscure / The unbearable detail of her anatomy. The sleeves / Of her gown, for instance, envelop her fingers, / Since the nails may mark her face." "We can bear only a glance."

Children aren't always angelic; in "My Discontent" we find the "child sleeping / Between us, her hair smells of white soap," although it is the husband who it "my discontent": "sleeping, as if sleep might close something."

The poems that explore domestic lives neither celebrate nor deride, although some may do both. Bickmore offers an "Elegy for a Housewife," and a poem whose mother-voice finds herself "Doomed, Sick, Selfish, Dumb as Shit." These are poems of fierce loves and quiet revolutions.

Ultimately, though, many of the best poems aren't domestic at all. In "The Road out of Lewiston" we have a "Doors tape, an endless loop droning ahead / To the start, from Riders on the Storm to L.A. / Woman -- each time it clicks over, I say to myself, // The beginning."

Others of the poems celebrate Utah's landscape, and others -- unafraid and unashamed -- explore the landscape of the body. Here's "Elements":

Before we went to sleep, We huddled on the floor, Searching and old map of Utah,

Seeking the legend of those Dry dusty names, austere mysteries We've never seen: Cataract Canyon,

The Needles, Standing Rocks, The Windows, the Maze. Then, We fell to the desert of sleep,

Dreaming separate dreams of red Rock, hot stone, God's arches Sculpted from the strata

Of time, and the sand, Shards of that hard light

Then I found Myself awake, naked as stone, Your lips at my breast;

But before I wholly woke, I half-dreamed myself part Of the dusty hills,

That elemental, with the purest, Deepest groundwaters running Secret in me, deeper than you

Or anyone could plumb, Deeper even than the most ardent Well of love or desire.

These are not poems to take lightly, and I think, Bickmore is not a poet to be taken that way either. This book should be only a stopping place as she moves toward a national audience. Although some of the poems seems to bear the marks of having been written long ago, before Bickmore's craft was as refined as it is now; and although some phrases and lines end up being much better than the whole poem in which they are embedded, the collection holds its own. It is strong, like wind. It is urgent.

[Bryan Waterman]