is to forget death.

For all of its strangeness, Strand's room uses a poem about poetry effectively.

Poems about the writing of poems can be pretty unbearably self-indulgent or just plain dull. Strand makes you forget that, while Orr barely escapes the problem:

With crayons and pieces of paper, I entered the empty room.

I sat on the floor and drew pictures all day.

One day I held a picture against the bare wall:

it was a window. Climbing through,

I stood in a sloping field

at dusk. As I began walking, night settled

Far ahead in the valley, I saw the lights

of a village, and always at my back I felt

the white room swallowing what was passed.

This room is slightly more gimmicky than Strand's; it leads to another place in the same manner Alice's lookingglass does. And this "other" world is never complete in any of Orr's poems because he uses a number of recurring symbols, which only become complete over a series of poems. Even common phrases like "threading" one's way through trees takes on a new meaning when, in another poem, a man's life is a "skull of red yarn/that unravels as he walks," and in still another poem, "behind you the dream burns the empty nests,/and before you the day with its ball of twine."

Orr remains in a dream where Strand only uses its structure. Burning the Empty Nests shouldn't scare you away just because it has a "symbolic structure." Despite the volume's occasional unevenness, its only bad effect is the craving for more it leaves behind.

AI'S CRUELTY., on the other hand, leaves very little to the suggestiveness of poetry. Its titles speak for the poetry's overbearing directness: "Forty-Three Year Old Woman, Masturbating," "The Corpse Hauler's Elegy," "The Cripple," "The Suicide," "Child Beater," "Starvation." Ai's purpose seems to be to attack the reader, lash out at the finer sensibilities. Her poems are description of desperate people or small narratives laced with hate and anger. There isn't even any self-pity in her characters--in "The Rivals," an old woman screams out at her cold husband: