Lucille Lang Day has earned the five stars not so much with this one title, as with her larger body of work, of which "Fire in the Garden" is but a snapshot. Eclectic and electric, Day's poetry is a feast for the brain. Her delicious, evocative imagery will excite readers of contemporary poetry and sustain hope that it is not about to be suffocated by the dry and abstruse theoretician/practitioners who have spread across so many of the arts over the last few generations. May all take notice how feasible it is for poetry to be at once accessible and intellectually commanding.
Day takes inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including "Fire in the Garden"'s first entire section based on the paintings and sculpture of such artists as O'Keefe, Dali, Diebenkorn. and Manuel Neri, whose sculpture exhibit prompted her to create a poetic dialog between two opposing voices from within, the one weary and negative, and the other challenging the first with its vibrant call to poetic awakeness: "Spiders in my skull spin fiery webs / and wild birds beat against my bones. / They want out. I, too, want out. / I want to walk where dusk spreads/gold dust on the earth, the mountains / humming, and jays and juncos land / on pine branches shaped like lightning."
Readers in whom Day's work resonates should appeal to her to engineer a republication of her first book,
"Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope," which contains in its first quarter what I'm convinced must be some of the finest biology-oriented poetry ever written. Investing years of her life in science (in which she earned a doctorate from UC Berkeley) paid double dividends giving inspiration to such resplendent poetic expression. In some small way, human culture is cheated every year that goes by without the opportunity for people to enjoy that bright outlook on the natural world so brilliantly depicted in language.

In the tradition of the best surrealism, Lucille Day's poems display unusual combinations of images that cohere to present a personal, and at the same time universal, vision of everyday struggles--a vision probing the consoling powers of imagination, "the cool blue flight/of stars, flowing/through the endless black." Her powerful, sharp-edged, declarative poems speak to all of us.

What is it like to live in the universe of modern science? Not merely to understand that universe or to teach it but to live in it. Lucille Lang Day's "Infinities" is an exploration of that question: quantum physics, the biosphere, the internal ("inner space") are all portions of her answer. Oppositins constantly threaten the dance (not the unity) of the poet's selfhood, yet it is her magic to dissolve contradiction with language. Correspondences abound: stars--the "fruit" of the sky--touch in her imagination the "fruit" of the earth: "lemons, oranges,...apples glowing / on the breakfast table." In what are surely some of the most extraordinary dramatic monologues ever written, the poet's human eroticism allows her to empathize with creatures like the stickleback ("His belly undulates. / I am mesmerized / by its redness") and the fence lizard ("He spends his days eating beetles, / sunning himself / and doing push-ups / on a fallen tree to impress me"). Yet the very same univrse which causes Day to feel a sense of ecstasy also inspires fear--a deep theme of the book: "So everything is nothing. / I may be going crazy...God / plays dice with the universe." The author glories in consciousness--which is to say, in being awake--yet "insomnia" also exists as a threat: "All eleven dimensions / of space and time exist / in my brain...I can't turn it off."

The description of Nature has always been an important aspect of California writing. In this brilliant book, Lucille Lang Day has found an entirely new way to do it. Her explorations of both human and nonhuman perspectives--of infinities and infinities--are impeccably and superbly alive. Here, even a tumor speaks: "I begin to sing. I am / a tiny siren / calling the capillaries...."

Lucille Lang Day's "Wild One" is a wonderful, frequently hilarious exploration of the life of a woman who refuses to let the world dictate to her. This "autobiography in verse" traces the poet's life from 1954 to the present. Married and pregnant at fourteen, Day shoplifts, quits school, undergoes various encounters with men, marries two more times (twice to the same man), goes back to school, has two daughters, an abortion, experiences severe depression, takes LSD, converts to Judaism, tries out different ways of dealing with the world. A woman, she tells her daughter, "is born twice": "the first / person she gives birth to / is herself." But the self is continually changing. Day's book documents a constantly expanding awareness of the world in which she functions. Finally, she will be satisfied by nothing less than the universe itself. "Wild One" is not so much a book about "coming-of-age" as it is a book about a confusing, tumultuous life which both amuses and baffles the author. Day seems constantly to be asking, "Why ever did I do that?" One of its great strengths is her keen awareness of paradox and contradiction. Even at thirteen, she knew that "bad" seemed "good." "Wild One" is like one of the answers Day fantasizes giving to her Ph.D. qualifying exam: "We want," she writes, "to map the cobwebby brain"; "The universe folds on itself." Probing, wondering, testing, "folding on themselves," her poems do the same thing.