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Robert Moore's first collection So Rarely in Our Skins is a knockout, full of insights, clever language, and humour - of both the mordant and laugh-out-loud variety. Moore has enormous control of all the poet's tools and applies them to a wide range of themes, tones, and subjects. In the scope of his interests, he reminds me of a Don McKay or A.F. Moritz. Moore is already the author of a dozen plays. As is often the case when a writer releases work that has been stored for years, the poetry is highly polished. The publisher's editing is impeccable as well.

Moore handles family issues with plenty of irony and intimacy. In This Morning on the Telephone the situation develops carefully, almost casually: "my mother tells me / that her oldest sister Margaret ... might lose a leg to gangrene / to save it they're bringing in maggots / from California / thereby starting my eye across her kitchen floor / down the stairs and along the shelves / behind the basement freezer / back into her old medical texts, catalogues / of vivid disfigurements into which I happened / a child holding on tight to a red crayon / they must be flying them in / is all I can think to say / too far to crawl she says / meeting me halfway."

Much of the middle section, also entitled So Rarely In Our Skins, deals with the deaths of several figures close to the poet. The writing is spare and controlled, enabling us to see much which is true about our relationships and the ending of them. In Werner Korsakov Says Hello, "His liver eventually poisoned his brain, / leaving conversation to circle the present / like a bird whose legs have dissolved." It's devastating metaphor of lost memory that ends, nevertheless, on a positive note: "This is good, he says from the bed / in the permanent room, / new pair of slippers on his lap; / open-mouthed, blue velour, the short-term memory of souvenirs. // But now everything is." Aging and loss of family are deftly handled in many places, but perhaps never so poetically as in Telling Time: "I used to gather one set of grandparents, stopped cold / in several photographs, into the small of my hands / like prayers."

Moore writes convincingly on the ironies of love and sexual entanglement. In Siren at the Service Station a calendar girl distracts the narrator while the mechanics pick his wallet clean. In Watches we are treated to a delightful tour-de-force on the inadequacies of language and the beauty of the word Bulova. Through the meditation, we come to realize the profound relationship we have with time and the tools we use to measure it. Moore ends with a trademark indication of our bodily limitations: "If you ever lose a watch, try not to picture the following: / one of the Fates holding it up to her nose and savouring your scent." The entire section Unfavourable Stars treats erotic relationships with much freshness, wit, and directness.

The cultural references come thick and fast in this book, as in Abracadastra where the life of the astronomer Kepler is related to the myth of Prometheus and of Adam's fall. Kepler's discoveries of the elliptical orbits of planets are compared to the theft of fire (sacred knowledge) and a punishment - in Moore's version - is meted out on Kepler's son. The Deer is a compelling meditation on our loss of wilderness that begins: "Standing in the backyard snow / four white-tailed deer in broad daylight / arranged in various attitudes / I almost said like lawn ornaments / but for the way they resisted / with their liquid eyes."

What will really impress you about this collection are the transformations of subject, so simply stated, such as "In poems / death will find a way / to breath / or vice versa // oh maybe not easily / but always / in the end // as if the two were the oldest of friends / separated for the moment in a crowd / at one of those lively country fairs ..." By the close, Moore helps us regain a vision of things as though we were children: "... each searching out the other's eyes / then working through the human crush / rubbing and laughing / their way together / because / well // it's warm // light pulls everyone's skin // and the balloons / can hardly contain themselves." Another fine example from an amazing book of poems.

Ruth Roach Pierson's first poetry collection from Buschek Books is entitled Where No Window Was. Like Moore, Pierson attempts great breadth of material, and provides enough epiphanies and well-turned phrases to satisfy most poetry readers. From time to time however, the emotion in the voice (or the subject material) tends to dominate the language, sending the poet into some prosaic phrasing. There is the sense too of diffusion, of longer poems where the details are too numerous, where the focus slips. The writing seems to veer from brilliance and a wonderful economy in poems such as Post War Photo and Dreaming of this Place to some self-indulgent considerations in poems such as Angels in the Snow and Lay the Bitter to Rest.

I found the most personal pieces to be the most successful ones: a poem such as The Gift is both a history and an extended meditation on the poet's relationship with her mother. Though it could have used tighter editing - to remove phrases such as "Age has strip-mined her mind," and "we threw soirees" - it brings us into the complexity and uncertain feelings at the heart of the relationship. Perhaps predictably, the passage of time reverses the roles and authority of mother and daughter by the poem's end. Another such poem in this vein is Repeat Performances where the poet revisits places from childhood. Place - as it was - is vividly rendered: "Bing / and Queen Anne cherries / ripening in the dry heat / the long-short snick snick / of the sprinklers' jerky rotation / hum and hiss of a low-flying / spray plane."

Pierson is not afraid to take on controversial or uncomfortable themes, as in the poem Oblique Light. The poet carefully analyzes how she feels after viewing an exhibition of Rubens paintings: "Do feelings belong more to the body than to the mind?" As she makes her way home, the deepening evening, the streetcar, and threatening weather, make an excellent setting for meditations on Heidegger and his support of Hitlerian social objectives, including "poetry's purpose / to bring das Germanic Volk // into sync with its true essence, / its historic role to save / the decadent West." The narrator's physical responses to the weather and her own thoughts blend well with the discomforting ideas in the poem. The poem ends with great vulnerability, a most attractive element found elsewhere in Pierson's writing: "I'm like a rattled leaf that lacks / understanding of the wind's purpose."

There is honesty and insight when Pierson turns to examining how our minds and memories work as in Before and After, "Two faint barks from a neighbourhood dog / tap my ear and recede like the drip, drip / of a defective faucet / then silence. / I brace myself / for the next but the next / doesn't come, and that / not-coming arrives / too late to ease my return / to where, in the dream / I go through a door / I've gone through before." This poem becomes lyrical as the dream establishes itself to wonderful effect. The borrowed story from the writer Yuk Lin, Ceremony is successful for different reasons, reading almost as a translation from another poetic tradition: "I want entry into a world of more ceremony / ... [a] clay pot, very rare, / ... after so many years the pot will prepare, / without leaves, without blossoms, / the finest imaginable infusion of that tea, / from memory." The book ends strongly with the villanelle Withdrawn: "How spend my days now I've days to spend? / Each night brings slight solace at lights out / Living slows to a dawdle as it nears its end."

A Beggar's Loom is Matt Santateresa's second book of poetry. The title (and cover) seem to suggest something mythic, possibly the story of Odysseus's homecoming, in the disguise of a beggar, while Penelope weaves upon a loom as a stratagem to forestall the suitors. One of the book's strengths is Santateresa's ability to draw our attention to turning points in history and in the culture of the Western world. Many poem titles are references to famous names and dates, which sometimes seem oblique or ill-suited to the poem which follows. But often the strategy is powerful. The book's first poem General Wolfe at Quebec, c. 1760 is typical of this impulse when it works. Here we are ostensibly reading a very personal (and hitherto unknown?) account of the famous man's experience:

behind the lines at midnight
scaling the limestone cliffs
my blind hands grasp branches
chokecherry, breathing
like stone. The bladder scalds, Katherine
I just beheaded one of my own men
who began to cry, ropes of blood
over rock

ravens whisper your name
wings encircle my head

Sometimes Santateresa's narrative voice becomes stilted, as in A First Time Homeowner Considers Ridding the Basement of Spiders. The humour in the title is abandoned by the poem's midpoint. The voice becomes too much for the material:

... I aim a nozzle and press
an aerosol can that fizzes and begins
to cover their dark existence, febrile legs
igneous torsos, now white indentures

I watch them retract to implosion, godless
into hard light, defensive nothings
that captured a darker imagination

Elsewhere, Santateresa is capable of great sensitivity. Witnessing What Appears at Paradise Lake begins, "I take this to mean leaving for good or worse / you're all dressed up and leaving your purse / on the lake shore as a tie to the world that / stops at the water's edge." Later in the poem, the narrator appears to become distracted and steps out of the narrative he has established. "It is abundantly clear this is a literary day.

// One on which revelations occurred to members / of all sorts of canons. Booming light." At the end we come close inside the allusion to other writing, to an experience one has as likely read about, as experienced. "This munificent day will not turn // to ruins by her exploit. She must be swimming behind / those rocks. Yes, she is, a crazy Jane / full of carpe diem." We have returned to the figure at the opening. Santateresa keeps the narrative and the reader in doubt as to the correct response, and to any certain interpretation of the event itself. Is this a suicide attempt or a liberating gesture at self-assertion? The poet is content to not say.

I found the book interesting for the challenges it puts to the reader and the rigorous, wide ranging intellect which informs the writing. The phrasing is concise and his subjects are well outside current fashions. This is an excellent book for the new spaces it claims for poetry. But I must also admit that often the poems left me cold or stranded half-way along the highway.