FOREWORD<br >by Thomas Lux<br >What a good idea: gather chapbook-sized collections from four ex-<br >cellent poets and print them together as one book. Four books for<br >the price of one， four different voices， each represented with a sub-<br >stantial number of poems， bound in one volume! Good idea! Since<br >poems are made out of words (and the sounds of those words) and<br >not ideas， as Paul Val&y said to the painter Edgar Degas， it is only a<br >good idea if the poems are good and these are， remarkably so， and<br >each poet s voice is distinct， utterly unique.<br >Myrna Goodman s poems are wry， irreverent towards things which<br > deserve irreverence (sexism， say)， playful ("My Two Cents")， elegiac，<br > and always vivid. She can turn poetic convention on its head with<br > lines like this from a poem called "Amelia": "But what matters most/<br > about the sky，/is that Amelia Earhart/got lost there." Blunt and beat><br > tiful and not what most people would think most important about<br > the sky. Another poem， "Moment，" captures precisely how memory<br > works， how one thing we see (or smell， or hear， etc.) makes us leap<br > to another thing we remember. In this case watching men cut down<br > a tree leads the speaker to a memory of her father s death: "I recall<br > how bending down to tie/his bowling shoe， my father lost his bal-<br > ance reaching/for the meaning of his last mortal moment on earth."<br > Goodman is not for the faint of heart -- a trait all good poets share.<br > Maxine Silverman has a terrific ear for our language. Her mostly<br > longish lines are lush and musical. Here are just two lines out of<br > context in the first poem of hers called "Trellis": "Fooled by rain<br > cooling the day， moonflowers bloom" and "The trellis， each lime<br > green leaf a lantern." One does not make that kind of music by ac-<br > cident. Even her syntax is musical (as it should be!) as in the opening<br > of "Cold Snap": "What the garden needs -- light/to compose earth<br > into nourishment/we dream of through winter." There s a beautiful<br > poem about mothers and daughters ("Early Morning， Mountain and<br > Deer") and a moving poem about the way the speaker s father eats<br > an apple， which reveals as much about a man and his character as a<br > 500 page novel might. Read these poems， reread them out loud!<br >