Her Number Is Disconnected : WHO WHISPERED NEAR ME <i> by Killarney Clary (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $14.95; 66 pp.; 0-374-28983-2) </i>

Killarney Clary is in her mid-30s and has lived all her life in Pasadena. This is her first collection.

“Who Whispered Near Me” is like a journal in the sense that it moves from accounts of small daily experiences to meditations and memories. It’s written in dense, mostly short passages of prose poetry.

In its allusions to the journal idiom it’s reminiscent of those poems by Frank O’Hara that are self-consciously framed by a time and place (as in “The Day Lady Died”: “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday/ . . . it is 1959”). Though she doesn’t give the datelines as O’Hara does she’s just as interested as he was in a diaristic voice and particularity.

This kind of writing gives a vivid sense of place so that just as O’Hara’s poems evoke New York, Clary’s evoke Southern California. In this way the book constantly arouses that feeling, which accompanies having lived in a place a long time, of constantly encountering previous selves scattered across the landscape.

It’s the interaction between time and self and place that the journal idiom is especially good at suggesting. The sense that days are where we live, that moment-by-moment our minds move between introspection and interpreting our surroundings, and that as these moments accumulate we change.

For O’Hara the journal analogy is joined by the telephone analogy. In his joke manifesto “Personism,” he says that he was once writing a poem to someone he loved and that “while I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem.”

Some of Clary’s poems, too, made me think I’d picked up the phone and caught a stranger in mid-flow--they have that sense of mysterious context, narrative undercurrent, unexplained names.

It’s partly this sense of something torn from context that makes “Who Whispered Near Me” a modernist work. If it’s a diary, then crucial pages are missing; if a phone call, it’s only intermittently audible.

This gives it the fragmentariness of modernism--the lack of the beginning, middle and end we expect from realism and a deliberate refusal of the realist sense that we occupy similar worlds, that a consensus can be created between writer and reader. The fragmentariness suggests that our experience comes to us in a baffling order and that other people’s minds are alien places.

So Clary makes a reference to the telephone analogy--the poem as phone call to a loved one--to suggest how the poet’s words can get scrambled on the line:

I’m irritable on the phone, feel I’m supposed to entertain you, but I’ve had a stupid day and my only thought is full of complaint. You’re tired, and the delay on the long-distance line causes us to interrupt each other and to say with a harsh edge, “I can’t hear you; I’m sorry.”

But Clary’s fragmentariness produces more meaning, not less. The suppressing of narrative (and even syntactical) links, and the switching around of narrative sequence, produce revealing juxtapositions and a vivid abruptness--the sense of an idea or image emerging with disconcerting suddenness:

The girls in the office are afraid of Lynn’s ghost. She’d been there, alive, working at her desk last week. I was only angry. A cough like a dog that won’t be shut out. Her body, finally. Be a ghost at least, Lynn, not so far away--heaven or nowhere--not so different.

Because this passage is presented without a defining context, “A cough like a dog that won’t be shut out” could have a narrative meaning--perhaps one of Lynn’s symptoms was a recurrent cough. Equally, though, it could be a simile referring back to the poet’s anger and forward to Lynn’s body. The anger is an internal irritant, like a cough, or something instinctive that won’t be turned away, like a dog. Lynn’s body is now a ghost returning as an internal disturbance, like a cough, or a homesick creature, like a dog.

In the same way, “not so different” could be a parallel plea to “not so far away”--a plea to Lynn not to leave altogether--or it could be suggesting that heaven is nowhere, that it doesn’t exist--so don’t try to go there.

There’s more, though, to Clary than modernism.

She’s clearly connected to that tradition in women’s poetry that’s been coming more clearly into focus in the last 20 years. This is a matter of distinct preoccupations, and a differently inflected language, from the male tradition.

Sometimes it’s connected to an explicit allegiance to feminine precursors, and sometimes, as in Clary’s case, to a feminine rereading of the male tradition. She sounds, occasionally, like a late 20th-Century female Whitman. Moreover, one of the central concerns of the book is an exploration of Clary’s relationships with her sister, her mother, female childhood friends, female colleagues.

And Clary has another tradition behind her, more surprising than either modernism or feminism. “Who Whispered Near Me” sometimes seems to echo the journals of Emerson and Thoreau, and like their journals, it is in a sense addressed to God--though she is less convinced than them that He exists. Some of her poems-as-phone-calls are attempted prayers (“I want a solution. So, ‘God,’ I pray, ‘finish this one unwavering note, at any cost, song or silence’ .”).

But like Gerard Manley Hopkins she worries that her prayers are “dead letters”: “And when I don’t pray, I whine, ‘Why should I send a letter to my friend who won’t answer?’.”