BIBLIOFILE
Swan, What Shores?
by Veronica Patterson
(NYU Press, 73 pages, $12.95)

It's easy to see why Veronica Patterson's Swan, What Shores? won the 2000 New York University Press Prize for Poetry. The swan motif and lines of a poem by the Hindi poet Kabir organize this intriguing, finely crafted book into five sections, with the first four being the most engaging.

In "Language Skills"--a prose poem whose epigraph by Kierkegaard warns us against "the sin of poeticizing"--Patterson injects a rhythmic fluidity of line into what might otherwise be prose: "When I was seventeen / and walked on a hill in spring outside Ithaca, / I stepped on blue blossoms whose name I didn't know / because for once the slope was 'carpeted with flowers.'" "I Want to Say Your Name" is a fine love poem that plays off a conversation between Jesus and Mary and ends: "And the wind blew between the letters. / Stars hung low over the peaks of the M / and in the a, a world orbited." On the subject of Jesus, "Veronica" takes us through entertaining, enlightening onomastics.

The poet deals deftly with grief in "Hush"--an apt title because it is what a mother tells a fretting child, the beginning of a lullaby. A small bird-shaped clay flute poignantly evokes the crushing loss of a child. The child's breath and music connect in the last lines of the poem. "...Do you wait somewhere / in a small cool room for breath / to make you flesh again or music?"

These poems find the shores of genuine feeling, the deeper philosophical implications of our existence, an occasional trace of the writing workshop being their only weakness. Carlos Reyes

Life Style
by Bruce Mau
(Phaidon, 625 pages, $69.95)

As with, S, M, L, XL--Bruce Mau's 1995 collaborative volume with architect Rem Koolhaas--Life Style densely layers text, narrative and images together to bring Mau's studio to life.

In Mau's world, design and content coexist in a continual process of growth. To Mau, a designer's tools (text, images, grids) become what rhythm and harmonic structures are
to John Cage: pathways to everything that floats beneath the surface.

Life Style is designed to wrestle with the issue of design in an image-driven culture where commerce assimilates all. The book is at once heavy but weightless, opaque but transparent, rhythmic yet chaotic, mundane yet stimulating. It performs the drama of life better than most theater, offering a sprawling series of ideas, associations and questions that stimulate creative thought.

Life Style isn't entirely about design. It's a book for everyone who values process over outcome and those who want change to be at the core of their work, whatever that work may be. While many of Mau's best insights are also amplified in the work of his mentors and colleagues (Duchamp, Marshall McLuhan, Cage, Chris Marker, Frank Gehry, Koolhaas et al.), Mau gives cultural criticism and creativity his own discernible spin. "As the mass and volume of information increase," he writes, "people search for a clear signal. More powerful than ever, the role of the navigator--one who gives pattern, shape and direction to the noise--becomes indispensable." Today's artists, designers, architects and writers are the navigators that Mau refers to, and as more boundaries fall between them, more opportunities for creative growth will arise. Bryan Markovitz

Eastward to Tartary
By Robert D. Kaplan
(Random House, 347 pages, $26.95)

"The human landscape is grim," says Robert Kaplan. If you're suspicious of the rosy picture painted by world villagers or politico-economists touting never-ending prosperity, Kaplan may be for you.

Eastward to Tartary is as much a roll call of injustices and intense ethnic hatreds as it is a cursory analysis of an area that captures a disproportional amount of media attention. In the first third, Kaplan returns to the Balkans (from whence he derived the best-selling Balkan Ghosts), where rapacious thugs scramble for dwindling resources in cosmetic democracies. This is the upbeat part of the book.

In the Holy Land, things are not. An unholy and secretive alliance between Islamic Turkey and Jewish Israel, Lebanese hegemony in ever-weakening Syria, growing chaos in Jordan, and gang control disguised as free-market capitalism in Lebanon will increasingly, Kaplan demonstrates, destabilize this region.

Finally, Kaplan turns to the southern perimeter of the old Soviet Union, including Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the "Stan States" of the Kazaks, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tajik and Kyrgyz. Here, huge numbers of the populace dwell in pits of Dickensian squalor so bleak that they are primed to accept any strongman who may promise them something brighter (think of the Weimar Republic's "salvation," which came in the form of a murderous clown).

The 20th century destroyed the old empires--Ottoman, British, Austro-Hungarian and Soviet--and the world is, Kaplan laments, far less cosmopolitan as a consequence. "Democracy," he says, "is beside the point"--it will cure few ills in unstable regions. Western leaders will need to know how or even when to intervene, and must learn to "do so without illusions." Steven Fidel