And then there's this Eskimo Tommy,

a skinny five-footer,

thick lenses and hard hearing

Her writer here writes for his reader instead of merely musing, and that is the letter's great strength.

DIRECT EXPERIENCE seems a more exciting source of images in the poems. When talking in her own voice. Harris tends to adopt interesting word combinations and compound words: "broomhandle-killing/that squirrel, carstunned and lost" she writes in "Manhattan As A Second Language." Asides in poetry are always dangerous, but when Harris writes in the first person she deals successfully with complex, convoluted images without losing the thread of her poetry. In "The Coddling Moth," she successfully creates a complicated, sensual comparison between a man and a moth, follows the moth into an apple grove, and leaps to agricultural science, throwing in the sarcastic lines "Polson pussy/synthesized and bottled." Then she returns to the man the poem describes, without ever confusing her images. In another poem, she addresses a snake, mocking and idolizing until the snake becomes an ideal woman. And the section of poems called "Talking That Talk" contrasts her voice against those of others, creating a rich, colloquial interior monologue that mirrors the city more accurately than would mere description.

For example, in "Tight Denim Jeans," Harris writes:

how do ya get 'em on? she said,

have surgery, take steam baths,

slimnastic classes 'n Dr. Nazi's

dietclinic fatshots for a month?

The woman narrator here can afford to be much more subjective than the poet; the urban chic, Seventies ideal of woman-as-stick is livened up by the speaker's flair. Here, the language gives power to this woman in her struggle against male-dominated popular fashion, against Manhattan.

THOUGH HARRIS underutilized her own voice in some poems, it stretches to encompass worlds in Harris's later "Chants," which she places, curiously enough, toward the beginning of the book. In "Beneath the Pole of Proud Raven," a voice takes over wolf's claws, fish's skin, and other natural powers, becoming everything. Harris's chants are prayers, exciting and meant to be read aloud. Her words are weapons in a struggle against the conventions of the city and the "second language" of urbanites.

These poems portray a battle between nature and the city; Harris clearly favors nature, which sometimes wins, sometimes loses. As a poet, she too is struggling for a balance between her voice and what she sees. When she "wins" and achieves the balance, she breaks through her own habitual language structures with new syntax combinations, through the limitations of whatever form she is using with a fresh attitude, and through the conventions of poetry with a unique style. Manhattan As A Second Language chronicles her fight against the weighty ceiling of writing in a world where so much has already been done. It is worth reading, not only because it shows her development as a poet, but because, in the end, her woman's voice becomes strong after facing all the second languages that oppose it.