Chugging power-chords, monster riffs and knock-yourself-out solos - this fantastic cassette has everything you need for recreating Woodstock in the comfort of your own room. The track "Make New Friends" might be telling you something though.

Cathy Song is one of my favorite modern poets. Her poem "Sunworshippers"from her last book, School Figures, may be my favorite poem written in the past 10 years. In this book, The Land of Bliss, Song continues to develop as a poet and presents us with another collection of beautiful and moving verse.

The opening poem of the collection, "Pokanini girl," is reminiscent of Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" but with a painful humor lacking in Brooks' sparse verse. Much of Song's strength in her verse comes from an uncanny ability to write mature poetry with the voice of a child. She is at once both adult and child. And she is very connected to her family and history (Chinese immigrants living in Hawaii). It gives much of her poetry an amazing power.

I am also struck by the recurrence of the color blue in these poems: poems with titles like "Blue," "Blueroses" and "The Sky-Blue Dress." There are blue roses painted on the box in "The Roses of Guadalajara," blue sleeves in "A City of Sleeves" and the hanging letters on pale blue lines in "Book of Hours." This color of sadness is a key to the tone of melancholy that runs through much of Song's work. And yet the beauty remains as illustrated in the recurrence of flowers and, in particular, roses.

I am constantly reminding people that, yes, the poetry of the past masters is wonderful but there is also a lot of amazing poetry still being written today. We just need to work a little harder to seek it out than the readers of past eras. Well, if you've come upon this review you have found your way to a wonderful modern poet. I would highly recommend this book.

Cathy Song's poems represent a sensitivity to the material world, the tenous connections between people, and the way in which culture suffuses our experience. As a young mother, I especially appreciate her sensitive exploration of the ties between mother and child. Without becoming maudlin or sentimental, she still captures the conflict of connectedness and separateness that this relationship entails. In Water Wings she writes about her son learning to swim. She speaks of the morning he leaves behind his inflatable "Water wings": This is sadness, I tell myself,/ the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind,/ because he will not remember/ that he and beauty were aligned,/ skimming across the water, nearly airborne,/ on his first solo flight/.../ At the other end,/ in another time frame,/ he waits for me-/ having already outdistanced this body,/ the one that slipped from me like a fish,/ floating, free of itself.