Clap Hands

This, Sarah Getty's third and final volume of poetry, takes us into her maturity and the beginnings of old age-which, like Moses, she was sadly destined to see only at a distance. It begins in darkness and the awareness of mortality (in her version of the ancient myth, Nut, the "aged dame," is "painted on the underside of coffin lids") but moves on to the beginning of new life in her celebration of her first grandchild. Then she explores the power of the female to give and sustain life, as well as to ward off death. Finally, the poet returns to one of the chief pleasures of her own too-short life-through her patient, careful, empathic observation ("the camera clicks") giving hosannas (the brush inks a bird) to the cycles of a fecund nature that only very rarely returns the gaze. If the job of humans-we "midges" on earth-is to suffer mortality and death, no one is better than Sarah Getty at giving witness to that transience and suffering. If the task is to give praise, no one does it better than Sarah Getty, with her thanks for all that nature has to offer. And she does so in language that juxtaposes colloquialisms with formal speech, the ancient with the modern, the mythic with the realistic-the mixture conveying her sympathetic and sometime humorous acknowledgment of the human dilemma and its place in the long sweep of the planet's history.