[Santos is an American poet and educator. In the following excerpt, he praises Skylight for its focus on love relationships between men and women.]

The two major concerns of [Skylight]—the revelation (both personal and didactic) of a feminist argument, and the painful exegesis of the love relationship between men and women—account for much of its anger and frustration, and for almost all of its best poems. It is a strong will that wrote much of this book, but it is also a poet who is not less interested in those moments when the will has been subsumed by what she calls, in one of her more moving poems, "the familiar carnage of love."

There are several poems which do not touch on either of those concerns, but they tend to be much less important by comparison. There is one cluster near the middle of the book—containing titles like "Real Estate," "Golden Retriever" and "Women's House"—which is, at best, only a humorous and witty digression from what is this book's really more serious intent. Lines such as "slide // with each slide of the old trombone, / be good to the bald, press up against / the ugly duck-like"—and these from a poem about life inside a women's prison, "Juanita talks / like a lady to a lady prisoner / who cut her baby up. Night struts in with night: / in a sequined dress, in tits, in the body of a man // a woman"—these lines tend to feel out of place when set against the fervor and compulsion of this book's strongest poems.

Much of the authority of Skylight derives from its systematic use of assertion and confrontation. One of its recurrent arguments is that the history of western civilization has been one-sided—there is, in the poet's terminology, his story and her story, and the former, the canonized version, only tells half (his half) of the truth, while the second, the as-yet-unwritten version, is still enmeshed "in a language we have yet to translate." Attaching her idea, in "Short Histories of the Sea," to what is, perhaps, the most appropriate metaphor, Muske locates the geographic (that is, psychological) nature of that schism: "What was beneath / had nothing to do with history // as they invented it: / sailor / warrior / king. // … in the sea / she is historian." The poem then proceeds to explicate its thesis:

       Above, we've never learned very well
       what makes us famous—
       the past turning up
       in the genes
       spontaneously
 
       with nothing to say
       about loving ourselves
       as fish
       or feminine gesture
 
       and no mention
       of this other history writing itself
       in the body's tides
       in spite of us.

The structure of Skylight is geared for a descent into that submarine world, into the world of memory ("they're the same, / memory and worry") and the world of speculation ("Just this moment. Two women. The future of the world"). There are repeated images of a struggle with speech, with that untranslated language, and there are numerous poems designed to enact that previously forbidden gesture of "loving ourselves": there is a moving tribute to the poet's mother ("Coral Sea, 1945"), to a Catholic nun who was her teacher in grade school ("Worry"), to a close woman friend on some unspecified "political" mission in Cyprus, and to Delmira Augustini, the turn-of-the-century Uruguayan poet who was murdered by her husband. All of these poems are demonstrations, in the Wordsworthian sense, of the ways in which the basic dogmatic assertions within the text are, in fact, an indistinguishable part of the poet's autobiography, indistinguishable, that is, until the poet wrests them from experience for the sake of her, and our, instruction.

But the poems I keep coming back to in this collection are of that second concern, those dealing with the love relationship between men and women. One critic recently called this book "asexual," a comment which seems to me now rather petulant, since behind almost every poem collected here (and I can find only two exceptions) there looms the explicit, and usually threatening, presence of a physical sexual identity. As the poet herself remarks in a poem about the childhood discovery of that identity, there is "Nowhere to hide the body!" It is a presence she even recognizes as powerful enough to threaten the very structure of her political ideas, dissolving rhetoric before the "brilliant manifesto of your hair." Still, the psychic terrain of these poems is much more complicated than just that, and one of the reasons I find these the strongest poems is because they are less decided, the lines of distinction are more ambiguously drawn. It is also because the poet is now implicated in "the crime," as she calls it, and what that gives rise to is a poem of greater urgency, surprise and self-discovery: the poet is no longer standing off in the wings always certain of the poem's outcome.

In "Fireflies," a central poem addressed to the poet's exhusband, Muske looks back on a major instance of failed love, to that moment when the couple begins to recognize the futility of their attempt to restore the relationship. The poem (a Shakespearean sonnet, rare in the repertoire of young poets these days) is masterful in its restraint, in its refusal to fall back on personal blame or guilt, in its exquisite surrender to the rather ominous destiny which now surrounds them both:

                      "Fireflies"
 
       We walked together up that country road.
       It was dark. Vermont. Another season.
       Then, looking up, we saw the sky explode
       with fireflies. Thousands, in one frisson
       of cold light, scattered in the trees, ablink
       in odd synchrony. That urgency,
       that lightening pulse, would make us stop, think
       of our own lives. The emergency
 
       that brought us here. The city, separation
       and the pain between us. Your hands that heal
       can't make us whole again; this nation
       of lovestruck bugs can't change that. Still, we feel
       the world briefly luminous, the old spark
       of nature's love. Around us now, the dark.

A less skillful or more sentimental poet would have found some way of ending this poem on the penultimate sentence, but Muske seems to harbor few illusions about love or romantic idealism—she is too smart, and experienced, to believe that the spark at the end of the poem (is it nostalgia? or romance?) is anything more enduring than the fireflies' blink.

More often than not Muske finds love played out on a kind of battlefield where the dialectic can be tested through the senses. The following lines are from an allegorical poem called "War Crimes," a poem in which the poet intentionally confuses the torturer and lover as each performs his private ritual on the peculiarly passive (though still responsive) body of the woman, until:

             the great nerve
       which runs from head to pelvis
       which makes us courteous
       shy
       scrupulous
       makes us touch one another with gentleness
 
       would tremble
       till it was plucked
       held in the pliers
       then in the fire
 
       shrivelling in that little violence
       of heat and light
 
       which in another form
       we often refer to
       as love.

But unlike "Fireflies," "War Crimes" is finally unconvincing, not only because the central conceit is slightly facile and the last strophe pre-emptive, but also because the "victim" seems such a mindless, if unwitting, accomplice—she seems somehow reduced to that "great nerve / which runs from head to pelvis."

But it is not to be in such a bleak allegorical landscape, nor in the domesticated landscape of Vermont, that Muske is to realize the most important insights into her theme—rather, it is in the much less clearly defined world of India, in that world where the dead float on the surface of the Ganges, where Untouchables linger outside hotels in which tourists "rise in glass elevators," where gardens are "built / by one lover for another in shapes / of perfect neurosis." It is in that world of contiguous antinomies that the poet finds the perfect setting (and now the perfect metaphor) for her own circumspect meditations: "The moon's on trial in its own courtroom." This is Diana she is referring to, we can be sure, and the verdict is, we find out, unequivocal, "guilty, guilty again." But just as she discovers in India that it is love itself that is culpable, so, too, she discovers there the possibility for a pure and selfless act of love. And it is a sign of Muske's bitter sense of irony that she only allows that discovery within such a tragic scenario, in the gesture of an old man in Benares lifting the body of his dead wife onto a ghat to be burned:

       In my time on earth
       I have seen few acts of true chivalry
       or reverence
       of man for woman.
 
       But the memory of him
       with her
       in the cradle of his arms
       placing her just so in the fire
       so she would burn faster
       so the kindling of the stretcher
       would catch—
       is enough for me now,
       will suffice
       for what remains on this earth
       a gesture of bereavement
       in the familiar carnage of love.

It may be that certain of the poems in Skylight overreach themselves, but that is, it would seem, the price any poet must pay who writes with a heart and mind as heavy with truth as Muske's best poems seem to show. And perhaps because of her vulnerability to an explicit notion of truth, Skylight is a book which is ultimately tortured by its own ideas: almost every assertion that it attempts is confronted in a later poem by some contradiction within the poet's own experience, so that the whole edifice of belief and conviction is contravened by an inner life at once passionate and vertiginous. And yet, in some wonderful, almost heroic way, Muske manages to hold onto both those worlds, and to assert the integrity and validity and autonomy of each.