Even if you say you don't like poetry—and I know that's true of some of you ‘cause I've *heard* you say it—I defy you to read this book's opening line and not smile at the sheer music of it. "I come from clutter so I clean—
and keen for utter clarity."

File that under Stuff I Wish I'd Written, if for nothing other than its skilled playfulness with sound. Indeed, Light's understanding of the music of language is the standout feature of this collection of pleasing and not-heavy poems. The music direction *cantabile,* which means "in a singing style," comes to mind.

And it's no wonder there's music in these poems; Light is a professional violinist and the author of concert pieces in addition to poetry. She alludes to this other life in the content of some of the poems, such as "Tortoise," when she tellls us that "a musician is ... like a tortoise: rigor mortised to your back's your livelihood and all your worldly good." In "Sabbatical" she comes right out and says: "Let me be clear about this:/ musicians *do not* get them." She goes on to explain that she had to become a "Something Else"--a poet--in order to give her instrument-playing fingers a rest.

This, Light's third collection, is the winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Award at West Chester University, home to the Poetry Center known for its championing of the so-called new formalism movement. To be sure, these poems are also distinctive for their careful composition, as solidly and prettily put together as a Shaker chair. The second half of the book is comprised completely of sonnets, and the poems of the first half, though not labeled as such, are also of a somewhat structured meter, many with end rhyme or peppered with internal rhymes. (That first poem, "Cleaning," continues further on with "I only offer this as a guide/ In case one needs to know what weeds one wore,/ what burden bore, or so.")

Many of the shorter poems are little more than extended metaphors, or charming riffs on one notion or image. In "The Idea is the Fleeting Ghostly Fish," a poem which uses its title as its first line, Light continues with, "that's lit up in the world of fathoms-deep/ announcing its arrival with a swish/ that makes the waters murmur in their sleep." In a sonnet called "He," we learn that the star of the title is "the main character in the drama," "the composer at the piano," and the one "who cast the final vote that broke the tie." The narrator, the she, only "rounded out the cast." With only 14 lines to work with a poet must take a close look at one thing, offering a fresh perspective on it and, if the poem is good, underlining the fact that one small idea can be enough to hinge a poem on. Most of these poems do both.

And if you hear echoes of bygone poets you're not wrong; Light's attention to meter and rhythm recall Byron, Burns, and others studied in school. But the voice telling us these small stories is a contemporary one. She puns, she quips ("You put *your* heart on my sleeve," she writes in "Cutting"), and she uses smart-kid colloquialisms such as the "sort-of redemption" she writes about in "Enough." Throughout the collection she also does the very modern thing of using italics for emphasis. Her conversational tone is appealing and warm, particularly if you like your writers on the friendly side, and indeed, she's been anthologized by Garrison Keillor in his immensely likable *Good Poems for Hard Times*.

Occasionally Light uses ellipses to close a poem, which I have a hard time with in the same way I tend to dislike songs that bring about their endings simply by getting quieter. I like a poem to land on its feet and stick its little chest out like a sturdy gymnast on a dismount. Light's more frequent rhyming-couplet endings achieve this affect nicely. Take "She Can't Swim Off," in which she uses swimming and driving away as metaphors for letting go of an attachment to a man who doesn't reciprocate. She ends the poem with lines solid enough to end this review on: "It is just his silken skin, the taste and thin/ and tall of him. A voice that's like a hymn or chant/ *You must swim off.* She can't."

copyright Katie Haegele 2006