Fuel

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 1 JUN 1998

"What will be forgotten/ falls over me/ like the sky/ over our whole neighborhood," writes Nye in her sixth full-length collection, lamenting the memories that will disappear with departing Texas neighbors. Nye, who is also a noted YA novelist and anthologist of poems for children (The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East, Forecasts, Mar. 2), spent part of her adolescence with family in Palestinian Jerusalem, and in another poem likens memories to the "broken bits,/ chips" swept away by the glass seller on the Via Dolorosa. But even as her speaker evokes a world that's fading from recollection and struggles to abide a life where "our tea has trouble being sweet," she finds wry consolation in "Pancakes with Santa" ("What else can we say to Santa?/ Santa says ain't"), and can take pleasure in watching a man letter a sign in Arabic and English. Such small-scale multi-ethnic negotiations run through the collection--from the Japanese city of Yokohama to Hebron and back to the poet's San Antonio home--and offer microcosmic takes on larger conflicts: "No one hears the soldiers come at night/ to pluck the olive tree from its cool sleep./ Ripping up its roots. This is not a headline/ in your country or mine." Nye's witnessings of everday life and strife never quite acquire collective force, yet they convey a delicate sense of moral concern and a necessary sense of urgency.