Taking on the Local Color

<P>Cynthia Genser's landscapes, like those of D.H. Lawrence, are analogues of human emotions; her men and women exist in their effects-prototypes one minute, passionate and distinctly visible individuals the next. Person and place invite the reader into an adventure that begins and ends everywhere.</P><P>The language employed throughout is voluptuous, sensuous, yet precise. The appeal is to all the senses as well as to reason and intelligence: the poems, seamed with a difficult, sweaty beauty, stimulate every pleasure center. But pure language play also leads to hard, intelligent sense.</P><P>Of her own work, Cynthia Genser has said, «Although I belong to no special school or group, I align my poetry with the work of others aiming their metaphors at the banality and reductionism of our world-at the terror or planned obsolescence, Vogue Magazine, the threat of nuclear warfare. I cannot agree more with the Marxist Henri Lefebvre that poetry is the enemy and eventual victor in the war against 'terrorism' and the terrorist society we now live in.»</P>