By Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Library, New York

Ishmael Reed's choice for this year's "National Poetry" series is easy to like: a first collection born, like its author, from the union of a United States military man and a Japanese woman during World War II. Roripaugh, who is also a pianist with a performance degree from Indiana University, convincingly re-creates her mother's war-bound world in clear, concise free verse, fusing classical Japanese poetic imagery - chrysanthemums, the moon, kimono sleeves - with the violence of war, occupation, and internment in the United States: "She says / oysters make them, when there's / sand or gravel under their shells. / It hurts. And the more it hurts / the bigger the pearl." American racism and cruelty is detailed in "Heart Mountain, 1943," a long first-person narrative about an internment camp; in the prose poem "Chrysanthemums," the poet's mopther recounts childhood koto lessons cut short by war. Other narrators are ghosts, or spirit-lovers, a classical Japanese conceit that resonates in light of recent history. But most of all these are the poems of a girl in the land-locked American West, where an Asian American may be treated only slightly better than a Native American, and squid in a sink smells like a lost country. This is a fine first collection.