For

Good poets hate to be put in boxes--and they write accordingly. Carol Snow's book of poems, "For", is confessional language poetry in a coffee table zen garden. It is a book of cool-headed searching that is not afraid to be domestic, married, and in love. Yet it is a sophisticated tease: it's frustrating to have a preposition floating on its own as "For" does on the cover of Snow's book. "For" what? we wonder. It's a question not formulated as one, and it keeps pointing towards the unknown. "For" is quiet at first hearing. The lines don't at first snap and lodge in one's memory, but they do look long and hard at the world, for something the eyes can latch on to. The language is tentative, edged with the cold stare of Experimental poetry, though it is a passionately lived and felt incarnation of the poet's spiritual quest. "For" roams, looking for a place to attach the wordlessness that comes at life's difficult moments. In the title poem Snow confronts the death of her father, as thousands of poems do, but she does so with wonderful confusion and uncertainty: "To begin, even in the--even with the--disarray." The substitution of prepositions delicately expresses the difficulty of telling about a loved one's death. "In" suggests that the speaker is still living in the event. "With" brings it along as luggage. The speaker exists both in the remembered event and in the present moment. Later in the poem the father writes a note to remind himself of the day. "They [doctors] usually ask me this." The speaker and her sister respond to this with a mixture of shock and laughter. In watching this, the sisters are compared to a mask "turned outward toward you, for--something heartless the heart goes out to." This is a chillingly honest description of dying--and the watching of it. Linguistically the speaker and her sister are in the same scary and oddly comical position as the father facing and entering death. "For" opens with a longing for a place where matters are reconciled. In "News Of" the speaker tries to reconcile "another massacre" with "the clear bright morning." Here, then, is another dangling preposition and a feeling of disconnection. There are too many things to attach "of" to and so many are not really known and felt. How do we attach our feelings and language to horrible events such as Columbine, especially when we are fine, and it is beautiful outside? Many of the poems, such as "Mask Series," explore this distance between self and world with the image of a tether: "It ran away from me." Snow compares this experience of losing the tether to a childhood game of "naming a series of natural objects placed in a box" and to God: "God wanted to behold/God," but balances her ambitions with the humble and warm image of the speaker's husband feeling in the dark for the flannel nightdress over her thigh. Carol Snow's semiotic and theological musings are never allowed to wander too far from sensory experience. Sh