Schwartz, Ruth L. Singular bodies.

Anhinga Press. 82p. c2001, 0-938078-69-0. $12.00. SA

Winner of the 2000 Anhinga Prize for poetry, Ruth Schwartz's collection is both passionate and incisive. The book is divided into three parts, in which she explores the workings of love, both in other relationships and in her own. She also uses troubling events in the outside world as triggers, as in "Hayward Shoreline," an indictment of industrial polluters whose waste threatens the lives of egrets on the California shore. Other poems in the first section are elegiac in nature, tributes to a friend's lover, dying of AIDS, or lives lived in the face of violence. But they're also poems of survival, a survival born out of questioning inequities, as in "Gravity": "But I wonder about this world,/ about how we come out of our stories,/ out of our bodies,/mangled constellations/tracing their light path, ... " The second section is devoted to poems about Schwartz's lover, for whom she made an ultimate sacrifice, the transplant of her kidney so that her lover might live. She speaks again, in the face of their fear, with hope: "But life is always crossing over water./ It moves outward, even now,/ whether or not there is a bridge,/ whether or not we can swim." This, I think, is by far the strongest part of the book.

Schwartz often uses images of birds: the egret, pigeons in a city park, crows at a picnic, swallows whose frenetic opening and closing of wings keep them aloft, a symbol of hope. At times, she's in danger of becoming pedantic, as in a poem about pigeons, when they become heroic like the other lost souls. Or she belabors a point, as in "After the Killed Bird," exhorting us to " ... only notice" in the last line. These are small quibbles in this strong collection that is her testament of faith in a world that tests that faith constantly. Sue E. Budin, YA Libn., Ann Arbor P.L., Ann Arbor, MI