Perpetua

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In her fourth collection, Broumas (Yale Younger Poets Award-winner Beginning with O) passionately invokes the redemptive forces of Eros to heal a world darkened by disease and oppression. In unabashedly erotic poems, her credo emerges: ``The text / of sex, word for word and by heart / divined, enacted / in the antechamber of the soul so kindly / also provided me, is my guide and prayer.'' The poet's Greek homeland lends mythic themes and shapely, light-filled images, as in ``On Earth,'' where she tells of the ritual exhumation of her father's bones with dignity, and in an evocative chapter entitled ``Lumens,'' touched by Sapphic utterances: ``I come from small seas littered with / Playful islands.'' More often, however, Broumas's poetic execution falls short of her conceptions. Too many poems are marred by a bewildering amalgam of images, awkward tropes or metaphors that drift toward the nonsensical: ``Like a pit in the fruit's ripe stomach, / encircled by airborne toxins clouding its permeable skin, / I am nourished, gratefully, / by the force of an unconditional / habit still linking life to the pulp of fruit.'' (Oct.)

Library Journal

Winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1977, Broumas's arc is wide in this, her fifth collection. These poems are about nature, lesbian sex, death, and relationships. As the titles attest, the poems are autobiographical: ``She Loves,'' ``Between Two Seas,'' ``Tryst.'' Yet the poems are not in the least confessional; instead, they ``draw the warmth of flesh from subtle graphite.'' One poem, ``Touched,'' describes the poet's work as a massage therapist, helping to heal the pain of a mother's loss by rubbing ``her deathmask/ belly till the stretch/ marks gleamed again, pearls/ on a blushing rise.'' A haiku-like section of poems completes the collection. These poems linger after being read. Recommended.-- Doris Lynch, Oakland P.L., Cal.