Shake, Rattle and Roll : Jagged poems that are wise and hip : SENSUAL MATH: Poems, <i> By Alice Fulton (Norton: $17.95; 128 pp.)</i>

Alice Fulton possesses a fingerprint-distinct voice and stellar credentials. Recipient of a 1991 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, she has also been awarded a Guggenheim and an Ingram Merrill Award. Fulton teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In her fourth volume of poems, “Sensual Math,” the knowing tone of the poems and pet themes that bob to the surface in piece after piece team up to provide the book with its shape, drive and crispness.

As the tension between the two words in the book’s title reflects, there seems to be a gentle tug of war going on in the work between the worlds of thinking and feeling. The language in the title appears to arm-wrestle with itself, and that kind of linguistic tussling continues within the poems, as different dictions play-fight and somersault over each other like a litter of feisty kittens. In each of this book’s four sections, consistent bits of rhyme and off-rhyme provide tempo, and it’s obvious the author has a love of these effects and a practiced ear for them. Science references pop up. There are breezy contemporary rejoinders and more formal poetic cadences. Darwinian musings, whiffs of Emily Dickinson and cameos by Elvis Presley take place.

The book’s final section is devoted to multiple reworkings of the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo: 11 poems on the nymph who was turned into a tree to avoid rape, and on her lust-bent immortal pursuer. Fulton employs a double equal sign as a proposed new piece of punctuation and within a poem with the sign as title discusses its possible uses to indicate gap, synapse, linkage or slippage. Hip advertising lingo and music-industry slang bounce around in the poems. Needless to say, Fulton is able to cover a lot of territory. All the above-mentioned elements vibrate, hum and rumble about in the reader’s mouth like flavors in a complicated head-and-heart stew.

My favorite poems in the book are probably those that attempt to grapple with strong emotion using Fulton’s intellect’s exacting, sometimes wry tender-hooks. These are poems like “Drills” and “Some Cool,” the first of which begins in an intensive summer language class, giving the poet the opportunity to dally with some pretty, italicized French phrases, and ends with the observation that sometimes, to humans in the midst of terrible mourning, tenderness can be as affronting and painful as blows:

In the first twist of grief,

I saw she could bear anything

better than a sweetness.

Certain kindly phrases or embraces

had the power to dissolve her.

“Don’t be nice to me. I can’t stand it

when you’re nice to me,” she’d say

as understanding drilled into the

cell’s marrow--

where nothing had the right to ever

dwell again.

Here Fulton scatters lines over the page, indenting to different degrees, breaking lines in a halting pattern, giving the poem a ragged coastline that seems consistent with the jaggedness of the uneasy emotions at the poem’s core and with the attempts on the part of both the speaker and those she’s describing to stay in control of those potentially raging feelings.

“Some Cool” is a piece in which terrifyingly vivid details of the inhumane way pigs are slaughtered are interspersed with intentionally glib lines about Christmas season preparations and the marketing of Elvis Presley as holiday product. The poem swings back and forth between these lines of thinking till they dizzily meld into some kind of absurdist sparerib-Presley-yuletide nightmare:

Our neighbor, who once upon a life

hauled pigs to slaughter,

said they are confined in little iron cribs

from farrowing to finishing.

Said steel yourself

this might be unpoetical and spoke

about electric prods and hooks

pushed into every hole.

About: they cried so much he wore earplugs.

While trimming the tree, I stop to give thanks

for the gifts we’ve received,

beginning with Elvis’s Favorite Recipes.

I’d like to try the red-eye gravy--

bacon drippings with black coffee . . . .

Fulton’s voice in readers’ ears asserts itself immediately, confidently. She’s got a penchant for facts that snap like rubber bands--both up-to-date info bytes (“TV rules: it must be visual velcro/at four grand per second. . . .” (“Vanishing Cream”), and antique ones (“The Norman name for quiver-grass/was lanque de femme. . . . “ (“Echo Location”). In these poems ‘90s-minded concerns are tartly and smartly articulated from word one, and readers will quickly be able to calculate whether the book’s taut dialectics and language play, erudite wisecracking and finger-popping, with occasional detonations of overt emotionality, are for them. As so often happens, there’s a line in one of the poems in “Sensual Math” that seems to zero in on much of what this lively book does:

” . . . put new wrinkles/in the sedentary wit of self/and state. . . .”