You never know what Gerry Gomez Pearlberg is going to do next. She's edited anthologies of lesbian love poems, and poems by queers about their dogs; she's written and won a Lambda literary award for a book of poetry called Marianne Faithfull's Cigarette. She's written a book called The Fetish Papers, as well as "9 Anal Haiku," a group of poems that should be self-explanatory. Her latest, Mr. Bluebird, is a collection of elegant yet colloquial poems about the sensuality of the natural world--about birds and plants and mud flats. A Brooklynite, Pearlberg embraces the contradictions of wanting to be a romantic "nature writer" in the city.

"Today/I'm Aladdin, or something/along those lines, switching places/with the idea of myself as un-/encumbered, adventurous, free," she writes, in a kind of declaration of departure from her earlier books. In Bluebird, like Aladdin rubbing his magic lamp for wishes, Pearlberg engages, word to word, skin to skin, with the physical body of the world. Though a lot of it is about birds and trees, Pearlberg's current work is still erotic in that it is about whole, loving, careful relationships between ourselves and something else. It's also, like the great erotic poetry of the past and some of Pearlberg's earlier verse, informed by the knowledge of death. "Death's the unpatented/gizmo built into all real beauty," says one poem. Another says, "I desperately need this slow and careful practice/of trying to really see this life, and trying to say it." The slow, careful practice of engaging with the world, despite the imminence of death, is what these smart, sad, sometimes even funny poems are about. REBECCA BROWN

GRANNY D: WALKING ACROSS AMERICA IN MY NINETIETH YEAR
by Doris Haddock, with Dennis Burke
(Villard)
$21.95

When Doris Haddock (Granny D), a retired shoe-factory worker and great-grandmother of 12, decided at age 89 that she was going to walk across America to promote campaign-finance reform, friends and relatives said she would never make it. This got her a little angry, and gave her an extra boost as she braved 105-degree deserts and a whiteout blizzard in West Virginia.

Granny D walked to remember her husband and best friend who had passed away, and because she was upset that campaign contributions were having more influence on national politics than regular people. Her trek generated an enormous amount of media attention, and inspired activists, congressmen, and grannies.

Sort of a rabble-rouser but also a patriot, Granny D believes deeply in traditional American ideals and the democratic system, but thinks those values have been corrupted by the influence of so much money in political campaigns. She believes politically progressive grannies like herself should have the same amount of pull in Washington as Exxon Mobil.

The book's liveliest moments are when Granny D is on the road wandering through abandoned buildings, drinking at a biker bar/strip joint (which she wanders into by mistake), pondering roadkill, nearly stepping on a rattlesnake, and speaking to enthusiastic crowds. But while her story is a fantastic one, this book has too many digressions about her childhood and personal life. Not much happens in these barely edited stories, which drag the book 100 pages past where it should end. ADAM BREGMAN

LOST AND FOUND

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

by J. Bronowski
(Harper & Row, 1965)
$4 used

This summer's mind-blowing show of William Blake's engravings at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has fanned a flurry of Blake-related publications, all of which are welcome in this era of the new corporate world order: Blake translated politics into myth, and addressed the world around him in intense yet obtusely shifting metaphors.

But in William Blake and the Age of Revolution, a 35-year-old work by a Polish mathematician, we are given a glimpse of the brutality of Blake's England. Imperial Britain is often mistakenly seen as a society that took care of its own while exploiting its colonies. With much detail about the tyrannical influence of industrializing (what today we'd call corporate influences), J. Bronowski takes us to a time in which common land was privatized by force, and capital offenses numbered in the hundreds; dissidents had to shape-shift to avoid execution.

In this book, Bronowski was among the first to challenge the assumption that Blake was mentally ill, speculating that his inscrutability was a coded attempt to undermine an oppressive regime and bring home the revolution sweeping France and America. But France embraced the Terror, and then Napoleon. Essentially blacklisted, Blake had difficulty finding work as an engraver in his old age, and by the time he died, the London literati were surprised to hear he had been alive that long. Today, Blake is probably the largest figure in Brit lit after Shakespeare.

One wishes, like W. H. Auden, that Blake had come west; American poetry (and America itself) might've been very different. Bronowski has, in the best sense, a dilettante's passion, and writes a learned and lucid account of a visionary in a time that instructively mirrors our own. GRANT COGSWELL