POETRY

BLACK SLIP by Terry Wolverton (Clothespin Fever Press, 5529 N. Figueroa, Los Angeles, Calif., 90042: $7.95; 89 pp.) Terry Wolverton was also raised in Detroit, but has lived in Los Angeles since 1976, where she is a big player in the poetry and feminist communities. These new poems are full of potential and disappointment, with rich, tough, lusty images that recur throughout. They are courageous and revealing, sometimes uncomfortably so, as Wolverton tells us: “I’m in a truth-telling mood and you won’t like it.� There’s a nice variety of form and texture here, from lean to embroidered, but what really permeates the language of these poems is a keen sense of self-doubt: “I don’t know how to trust the earth/ its breath and rhythms its furious molten core/ I don’t believe that my foot will fall sure on the dirt/that creatures will befriend and not attack/that seeds will yield anything at all.�