By James Beschta, English teacher, Quabbin Reg. H.S., Quabbin, MA

This 1998 National Poetry Series winner, as selected by Ishmael Reed, is startlingly unique in its approach and perspective. The poems reflect the immediate and distant effects of the internment of Japanese Americans in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, where the isolation and distance applied as much to detainees as to the landscape itself, "lonely in so much sky / and sagebrush." The middle section of the volume, "Heart Mountain, 1943," is a series of ten persona pieces portraying the injustice. "They're exterminating / just like they made my dog go to sleep / when we left Sacrament - he was Japanese," and the experience of incarceration. "Last month the watchtower guards / brought in a little boy found / tangled in barbed wire the way / antelope sometimes get caught." Yet even more moving are the residual effects, the reflections of a young girl. "I'm half-and-half, and I hide / in the house," obviously pained and shamed and consience stricken for being so: "I wish I had long, white skinny / fingers, gold hair . . ." Especially poignant and touching is "Oyurushi," an ironic description of a childhood friendship and the circumstances wherein survival demands the betrayal of those most like ourselves. The harsh vastness of the West is dramatically contrasted to a style obviously influenced by traditional Japanese writing, one of image echoing image relying primarily on evocation for suggestion: "But maybe silence is song, so / I keep it furled / tight around me like the ornage / origami / of a peony bud, and wait / for spring to come . . ." Like the content and point of view, this is at once familiar and eerily individual, justification for the book and its prize.