When Inside the Blood Factory was published in 1968, it was clear that in the poetry of Diane Wakoski a new sort of energy had been tapped. A fierce impulse toward confession and autobiography moved through her poems, but it took unexpected detours into an imagery of elusive beasts, colors and bizarre precious stones. The "me" she confessed to was not contained by situations; it was not an object of complaint. Although her poems were stirred by angers and fears, they did not include gestures toward suicide, the madhouse or the pill bottle. Instead, she confessed to the hippogriff in her soul, which carried her like an exulting spirit among the men who loved her, or betrayed her. The blend of exotic shapes and swift spoken language was often startling, as in "Blue Monday":

the crystal in your arm cuts away
the night, folds back ebony whale skin
and my face, the blue of new rifles,
and my neck, the blue of Egypt,
and my breasts, the blue of sand,
and my arms, bass blue,
and my stomach, arsenic;
there is electricity dripping from me like cream;
there is love dripping from me I cannot use like acacia or
jacaranda—fallen blue and gold flowers, crushed into the street.

Diane Wakoski wrote poems of loss. The loss of childhood; the loss of lovers and family; the perpetual loss a woman lives with when she thinks she is not beautiful. These losses created a scorched earth of isolation around her, which she described harshly and precisely:

When he diagnosed
my case,
it left me with little
hope.
"You have an invisible telephone booth
around you,"
he said.

From this vulnerable retreat, a stream of liberating images emerged to grapple with the world and mythify it.

But Inside the Blood Factory was also an erratic book. Many of the longer poems rambled inconclusively. Miss Wakoski's very exuberance tended to play tricks on her by allowing the intensely personal core of the poems to become stifled in a mesh of images that moved far away from any recognizable center. In a sense, the failures of the book were very much in the image of its power; the best and the worst belonged to each other, for both resulted from the poet's defiant commitment to her freedom. It might have been better if we'd been spared the bad poems, but their rambling may have formed the only ground from which Diane Wakoski's imposing inwardness could spring. There is, after all, a bravery that artists may need more than most people: a willingness to risk being ridiculous, in order to expose the reluctant figures in their lives.

During the years since Inside the Blood Factory, Miss Wakoski has written voluminously. She has published an extremely interesting volume entitled "The Magellenic Clouds"; several pamphlets containing sections of a long poem, "Greed"; and now another long volume, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. The accomplished energy, as well as the limitations of her work, appears even more strongly in these new poems. The same obsessive themes are present: the woman betrayed, the anger she feels at her frail body and her face which seems hard to love; the rescue performed by the imagination, which reaches around the bareness of her life to create the comfort of cleanly expressed needs. The book is haunted by a curious mythology composed of mustached lovers, "mechanics" who do not understand the engine humming under her skin, the great-grandfatherly warmth of Beethoven and George Washington, to whom she turns with humor but also with a sort of desperation.

The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems are more open than much of Miss Wakoski's earlier work. An example is "Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons," perhaps the most beautiful poem in the book, with lines in it like these:

The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
as if you were walking on the beach
and found a diamond
as big as a shoe;

as if
you had just built a wooden table
and the smell of sawdust was in the air,
your hands dry and woody;

as if
you had eluded
the man in the dark hat who had been following you
all week …

The directness of these lines describing the combat that art enables the poet to wage against the bitterness of her life is one of the very best qualities in the book. In much of it, Miss Wakoski achieves an intensity of simple speech that is rare in contemporary poetry; for example, in the opening poem, "I Have Had to Learn to Live With My Face":

The word "betrayal" crops up again and again self-betrayal and more often betrayal by others, so many others. Sometimes the poet answers these failures of trust with acts of self-understanding; sometimes, more rarely, with self-pity. But most of all, it is with anger, flights of strident anger, whose intensity can be overwhelming, as in "Love Letter Postmarked Van Beethoven," where she describes herself drilling bullet holes into the bodies of the lovers who have betrayed her, with a 38-caliber Thomson Contender, "the one they recommend for shooting rattlesnakes."

These poems are not declarations of feminine independence. Their rage is not ideological, as in many Women's Liberation tracts. Miss Wakoski's tactic is different. She digs her teeth into the slaveries of woman, she cries them aloud with such fulminating energy that the chains begin to melt of themselves. The rage is that of a prisoner whose bitterness is her bondage but also her freedom.

In many poems, however, the anger becomes thin, repetitious, and this is perhaps the book's most serious weakness. All too often, the stridency does not turn into poetry; the words are flattened almost into helplessness by the very anger they express. The tone is set in Miss Wakoski's dedicatory sentence: "This book is dedicated to all those men who betrayed me at one time or another, in hopes they will fall off their motorcycles and break their necks." The humor intended here does not quite come off. The anger in many of the poems is too steely, and after a while one feels a failure of generosity, a sort of blindness that harms them.

But this is far from general in the book. Many poems survive, and they are like nothing I know in contemporary poetry. Often enough, the vindictive rage is rounded into whimsy and self-knowledge, or into asides of sheer fantasy that charm the reader while they are chilling him with insight. There is a remarkable short poem, "Black Leather Because Bumblebees Look Like It," that begins:

This is what Miss Wakoski can do so well—reaching into the hive of her angers, she plucks out images of fear and delight that are transparent, yet loaded with the darknesses of life.

Yes, there are failures in The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems: But they are the sort of failures that lesser poets could have avoided without improving themselves. At her best—and the best is frequent enough—Diane Wakoski is an important and moving poet.