[In the following excerpt, Shaw argues that Pollitt is most insightful when she remains detached from her subjects.]

At the center of Katha Pollitt's Antarctic Traveller, her first book, are "Five Poems from Japanese Paintings." Even without these one would have noted in her writing those qualities which for the Japanese, as she says, encompass "the virtues of the noble man: / reticence, calm, clarity of mind." Whether inspired by paintings or daily surroundings, Pollitt's poems are marked by a beautiful economy of line, a selective cherishing of detail. The Orient's respect for nuance underlies her similes: on the Hudson "a sailboat quivers like a white leaf in the wind:; on a Japanese screen "Prince Genji, the great lover, / sails in triumph from bedroom to bedroom: in each / a woman flutters like a tiny jeweled fan." If the style of these poems recalls ancient Japanese masters, the mood they evoke is more that of a modern Western painter such as Edward Hopper, in whose stark interiors light is the most eloquent inhabitant. We see rooms or landscapes in which anticipation or regret linger as distilled presences, the human actors having left a moment ago or having not yet arrived. The poet draws intensity from life's interstices. When she is most introspective she maintains an austere, appraising distance, deliberately estranged from the self so as to be capable of judgement. In "Blue Window" she explores "that longing you have to be invisible, / transparent as glass, thin air," and concludes:

      It is your other, solitary self
      that calls you to the window where you stand
      dreaming in the dusk in an ecstasy of longing
      while your white apartment full of plants and pictures
      grows strange with shadows, as though under water
      And in another moment
      you would stream out the window and into the sky like a breath—
      but it is almost too dark to see. In the next apartment
      a door is flung open. Someone speaks someone's name.

Such detachment takes on an ironic trenchancy at the end of "Turning Thirty":

      Oh, what were you doing, why weren't you paying attention
      that piercingly blue day, not a cloud in the sky,
      when suddenly "choices"
      ceased to mean "infinite possibilities"
      and became instead "deciding what to do without"?
      No wonder you're happiest now
      riding on trains from one lover to the next.
      In those black, night-mirrored windows
      a wild white face, operatic, still enthralls you:
      a romantic heroine,
      suspended between lives, suspended between destinations.

The pun suggested by the last image is irresistible: this poet has a gift for reflection. What is uncommon is for this capacity to be joined with a delicately acute vision of the world outside the self, a world where "at three o'clock in the morning / the Staten Island ferry sails for pure joy," and where, in a January thaw, "on the pond the round ice floats free; / a moon / gone black in black water." This book has many triumphs and no blunders. It makes one impatient for more.