Lauren Haldeman, _Instead of Dying_

SELECTED BY SUSAN Howe for the Colorado Prize for Poetry, which is recommendation enough for me and, I imagine, for you.

The volume has a kind of...I'm not sure this is the best word, but I'm going to go with "spatial" arrangement. It is arranged in seven sections, with the twist that the first and seventh sections are formally alike--so much so, in fact, that they could be considered two halves of one long poem. The second and fifth sections are similarly alike, as are the third and sixth. The fourth, right at the midpoint of the book, is a kind of stand-alone pivot piece, the focal point of a not-quite chiasmus.

The poems in second and fifth sections themselves seem chiasmus-inspired. There are five poems in each section, unless we want to say ten, because they come in pairs; Haldeman (I got to hear her read recently) calls them "mirror poems." The first line of the poem on the verso of two facing pages will be flipped, as it were, in the first line of the poem on the recto page. For example, the opening line "Yes. Alien life-forms exist" in one poem becomes "Existing forms of life are alien; yes &" in the first line of the poem on the facing page. It's a simple enough trick, but the results are fascinating, as the paired poems, even though the key words are unchanged, often proceed down surprisingly different paths. Two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and Haldeman takes both.

The third and the sixth sections sound like transmissions that somehow drifted in on the ether from a dada-verse. The larger part of them, it turns out, are things Haldeman's daughter said: "My skin smells like the sun / after I've been in the sun," or "Did the bubble run out of batteries?" The lingering impression is of charm, although a charm not without occasional disquiet: "Kitty is climbing that great ladder of shadows."

The central section of the book, its Ptolemaic Earth or Copernican sun, is a history of western astronomy in seven short biographical poems (Ptolemy, Aristotle, Copernicus, et al.) and a finale, "Eighth Heaven." Spookily informative. I particularly recommend "Tycho Brahe."

The real weight of the book, though, is in outer shell, so to speak, its first and its final sections, each consisting of seven poems, each inspired by a life that might have been lived by Haldeman's late brother, murdered on the streets of Denver. It's a different approach--memories are our usual resource in commemorating our dead--but dreaming up futures for the lost loved one, as Haldeman does, has an emotional power of its own.