Green, by Sidney Wade. University of South Carolina Press. $15.95 cloth; $9.95 paper.

Green is a grab-bag of styles and sensibilities--and disconcerting because of this. Sidney Wade avows her fondness for "the wheedle / and the whine, the spotty metaphor," adding that she loves "finely / whittled rhetoric as well as sulk and puffery, / the luffing trope, the twang of the diurnal sprawl." She indeed sports with rhetorical figures, as well as ostentatiously (or ironically?) displays her affection for exoticism, Greco-Roman mythology, kitsch, mixed levels of diction, and foreign phrases. Most disconcerting of all, several of these forty-five poems are composed "after" other poets' work. Anakreon, Alcaeus, Herakleitos, Dante, Virgil, Wallace Stevens, Zbigniew Herbert, the artist Mehmet Siyah Qalem, and others, parade before our eyes. Elsewhere, a sort of lexical giddiness bursts forth and smothers an otherwise banal happenstance, such as contracting...