Human Line

';Poetry,' writes best-selling author Ellen Bass, ';is the way I pay attention, appreciate, give praise, struggle, grieve, rage, and pray.

It's the way I embody my love for the world.' The Human Line, Bass' seventh book of poems, startles with its precise detail, intimate images, and wild metaphors.

Bass brings attention to life's endearing absurdities, and many of the poems flash with a keen sense of humor.

She also faces many of the crucial moral dilemmas of our timegenetic engineering, environmental issues, continuous war, heterosexismand grounds her vision in the small, private workings of the heart.. . . When I get home,my son has a headache, and though he'salmost grown, asks me to sing him a song.We lie together on the lumpy couchand I warble out the old show tunes, Night and Day . . .They Can't Take That Away from Me . . . A cheapsilver chain shimmers across his throatrising and falling with his pulse.

There never wasanything else. Only these excruciatinglyinsignificant creatures we love.

Ellen Bass is co-author of the million-selling book Courage to Heal.

She lives and teaches in Santa Cruz, California.