Watching for Signs

In her debut collection, Joyce marries deep sensuality about the natural world and casual familiarity with the quotidian in human lives. Her voice is a lyricist's, for she is a poet for whom "everything is a door . . . / Everything is alive." Although intensely personal, her poems are never confessional. They don't startle us with intimate exposures but reveal the commonality of such experiences as the distances that grow between parents and children and the losses of old age. Like her countrywoman Eavan Boland, Joyce is unabashedly feminine, using images from women's lives to define human emotional reach, as when a shopper tries on different sweaters as routes to understanding her various and contradictory selves. Joyce's most affecting poems are those in which nature and human emotion coalesce, as in the brief poem about a loved one's death: "Today the river stopped flowing. / Drought reached my soul . . . / Today I listen to a long whisper / carry you off on a broken wing." A poet to watch. Patricia MonaghanCopyright American Library Association. All rights reserved