In Il Cuore, Kathleen Fraser's lovely poetry centers around the Italian landscape and Italian art. Two things that are, by their very nature, already infused with poetry, Fraser elaborates on these themes and exposes their underlying beauty.

She writes: The letter A is a plow/Was A/where/you made and/unmade your mind.../first hesitation/when you doubted/what you/thought you/were/looking for?

A highly stylized tool for observing and uncovering the world, language, in Fraser's hands, becomes poems of imagistic precision that uncover beauty and our own response to it. The twenty-five years of work in Il Cuore are poems of a disjunctive and fragmentary structure that still manage to convey a feeling of wholeness and completeness. The author makes use of mathematical diagrams, the shapes and shadings of letters as well as lyric odes to fashion lovely skeletal poetry whose dense pockets of energy and blank spaces create a palette of Impressionism, much in the way Debussy did with music. One example is Tree: One did hear/the flow of nearby branches/shear occasional and limp/yet this rawness/moves, is/moving/even sudden atrophy/of limb.

Fraser, who lives part time in Italy, knows her subject matter well and, with few words, manages to convey all the differences between what's seen, what's felt, what's said and most of all, what's only perceived. In one of Giotto's Arena chapel frescoes, Fraser sees: a salmon length of brick the same/as Virgin's gown, angel feathers/salmon flesh and roe/lifting one swift arc. She is a poet with the talent to perceive perception: motion (less leaves) blue sky/inlaid their branching/lightness/pale rose breadth/of shade/through intervals.

"The New," Fraser says, "comes forward in its edges in order to be itself." The poems in Il Cuore, so filled with lyric skeletal beauty, create impressions with their silences as much as they do with their carefully-chosen words. These are truly poems that cut deep and remain.

In this wonderful book of vibrant and challenging essays, Fraser questions the dominant forms of both poetry and culture without becoming overly polemical. So often, in claiming her own and women's territory, a writer will mow down everyone who even remotely strays from her standards; but Fraser's essays (the title one is a prime example) present and explain a number of varying forms, a number of ways of working through what is to be worked through, without privileging any of them. When she writes about finding her own voice in the sixties, or about starting the experimental journal HOW(ever), she manages to convey her struggle at that time without damning The Oppressor. It's a difficult stance to take -- one which could easily be tarnished by watching the celebrated poets of the world preen in the adulation of the academy -- and it filled me with a kind of buoyant hope for where literature might yet be going.