Not To

Elaine Terranova, winner of the Walt Whitman Award and other honors, has a new collection of poems called *Not To*. During the few weeks that I carried it around with me--physically and metaphorically—the phrase that kept echoing in my head was *Because They Wanted To*, which is the title of Mary Gaitskill's 1997 collection of unsparing short stories. The association was accidental but the comparison, upon consideration, is at least a little bit apt. The poems in this collection, like Gaitskill's stories, tread bravely across the minefield of the everyday; they dig down and explore the inside-out vastness of life's small and sometimes treacherous moments.

That said, Terranova's title is a carefully chosen two words only, and the book, which includes new poems as well as selections from her other four collections, is broken into sections with titles that play with those words: Not Two, Knot Two, Not Too, and Noto. Most of the poems of Knot Two, for instance, explore romantic love, which was a delightful discovery. After all, what is poetry if it's not alive to wordplay and nuances of meaning?

*Not To* is a strong collection in part because of the sheer range of emotion it covers. Terranova has been publishing for 26 years or so, and these are truly songs of experience. Like the process of becoming experienced, these poems ask us to pay attention. When we do, we're rewarded with the discovery of confident little truths nestled into the dense stuff of their surroundings, like rings in their velvet-lined boxes.

Some poems, like the pained day described in "Mint," are tiny domestic depictions, like dollhouse miniatures. Others are pastorals, like the sheep in "Sheep," who want to be "counted or blessed" and the couple who visit them. Still others are about the place where civilization and wilderness meet, the moments when people see themselves reflected in the natural world. Take the cardinal in "The Cardinal," who keeps banging his head against the window. He's probably only cracking seeds for food, but from within her fraught family sphere the narrator confesses: "My own idea/ about the cardinal is,/ he's fighting for his life./ He sees an enemy, not just/ that pale reflection in the glass."

Terranova finds different ways of telling us these things. Sometimes it's an image that's so apt it rejiggers the way we see things, if only for a minute. In "Dinner at the Holiday Inn," the narrator, haunted by modernity, sees her own face reflected in the darkened window "like a ghost in a jar." Indeed, poems throughout the collection are peppered with surprising metaphors; my favorites are the ones that use language itself as a stand-in for something else. For instance, in "Break" we learn that "the break in a bone, simple or compound" is "like a reckless sentence." In "Carina," Terranova captures the queasy feeling of a very young woman's vulnerability in the world, telling us that the girl's name, Carina, "could be a cognate of careening." As Terranova writes so vividly, "Things walk in the halls/ of a word." Oh, they do.

Of the selected older work, the poems from 1991's *The Cult of the Right Hand* are especially strong. This is where Terranova reports the ways that things can *become* something different. Here, family scenes and their players take on the largeness of myths, and the rules of religious observance turn doing tasks like lighting the stove into sins.

It's a mistake to hunt for the *person* behind the poems, but if you look you can find the poet. In one of my favorites of the new poems, "Sleeping Rats Dream of the Maze," Terranova plays with the idea of a psychological test, "a study of happiness and its effects." She describes a study in which one group of women was told to think of the best time in their lives while a second group thought of the worst before they all received flu shots. "No surprise who'd produce antibodies," as Terranova writes. "Didn't the researchers know,/ the way is novel is about something/ besides what happens, people's lives/ are about something else too?

Terranova knows it, and that's what her poems are about—the something else.