Mara Levine not only writes in the heart of the contemporary American tradition, she writes from the heart. American poetry is known for its specificity, strongly imagistic, often a first person account of family and events. If Mara's poems were not so clearly built on sincere concern for each subject, they might indeed be just well-crafted exercises. What makes her poems so much better is the overall sense that the remembrances, the travels, the politics are of real importance to her; so much so they encompass us all.

We have all read poems that sound more like homework than art. Occasional poems, similarly, are only occasionally good. Travel poems can be as dull as watching a friend's home videos. Next to all the potential for the unremarkable, juxtapose poems such as those in the section "Pandora's Legacy." More than just "protest" poems, they are infused with such empathy that we are compelled to care.

"The Weavers of Kashmir, " seizes the eye as strongly as the "stags running through silk tapestries, " even as it exposes us to a "Life in the dark/ crouching at the loom." Settings as diverse as Hiroshima and an Inuit Village coach us: "Teach your

children peaceful ways, / help them fly."

Mara's are not just language poems, nor are they so specific or personal that we feel left out. "Unveiling, 2001" asks "What breed of men/ are we rearing who, / …would stone us, their mothers?" In "Waiting for the Train, " we see what a poet can blend from personal observation, learning and language so taut as to ask: "Where does it start, / the lapse of love/ that leaves us dying?"

There's nothing wrong with showing one's erudition and inventiveness in language, but most of all Mara wins us over with poem after poem presenting her own family as all of our families; her "Generations, " are ours. The poems move from her childhood wish to pay "The Fiddler, " to her being out "On my Own, " through remembrances of "Mother" and "Closing My Father's Apartment."

Mara does not so much weave a polemic against apathy as provide a model for empathy. In "Twin Beds, " her mother's "songs of liberation/ … ladled dreams, " feed all good people's yearnings for a loving companion in a loving world. Mara Levine's poems are, themselves, a worthy stride toward that end.

David B. Axelrod