To absent men

SEVERAL years ago, I took a workshop from a poet in Upper Manhattan. The idea was that students would pay to have their poems scissored up and rearranged. The teacher had a captivating, witchy style, but all the poems came out sounding like hers. No matter -- she had interesting poet friends, and she'd bring them in from time to time.

One evening, a woman with short gray hair and a radiant face, dressed like a nun in loose black cotton, was sitting on the couch: Linda Gregg. I've often thought about her writing advice: Buy a pack of Tarot cards, and when you're stuck, draw one and write a poem based on its symbolic story.

The deck of cards Gregg plays with in "All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems" is more Edith Hamilton than Rider-Waite. The imagery is Aegean, the legacy of five years Gregg spent in Greece. She punctuates the poems with sea-gazing, descriptive gaps that force blankness on the mind; her oceans are as simple and numinous as Rothko's black paintings, "light by the shore, then dark farther out."

Many of these poems find the poet alone in a landscape that has been recently deserted by a man, but where you might expect to find howling lamentation, Gregg is contemplative and wry -- perhaps even a little relieved. "When the men leave me, / they leave me in a beautiful place," she writes. "When I think of them now, / I think of the place. / And being happy alone afterwards." When she writes, in a poem that numbly invites death to come and get her, "My love got on a boat / and it went away. I stayed," I don't hear resignation so much as willfulness. (Cf. the voicey "No More Marriages": "Well there ain't going to be no more marriages. / And no goddam honeymoons. Not if I can help it.") In later poems, the solitude has a more elemental quality. Parting no longer fresh, the poet has refined the emptiness: "Left alone in the stillness / in that pure silence married / to the stillness of nature."

But although Gregg documents the ravishments of love, I don't think of her as a love poet. These are allegories draped in the vestments of contemporary lyric love poems, where gone men serve as a metaphor for the lost divine. In "The Bounty After the Bounty" -- a syncretic poem that, in a few deft strokes, reconciles the impulses of Greco-Roman and chthonic spiritual traditions, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity -- Gregg pushes the conceit. She begins in pilgrimage to a sacred site, "A mountain of three goddesses / without goddesses. Where they had been. / Gone, but truer therefore," only to realize that "The statue is / camouflage for emptiness left behind." This leads her to conclude that "Our failure was thinking Christ / was His presence. / We were blinded by the actual body / of Jesus." Christian religious practice, then, is based on a misreading. Christ -- the ultimate abandoner -- is not God but a reminder of "the intensity," a living metaphor.