CRASH’S LAW. <i> By Karen Volkman (W. W. Norton: 80 pp., $18.95)</i>

“Crash’s Law”--the title sets in motion the psychic drama of Karen Volkman’s nimble first collection of poetry. At once oxymoronic and paradoxical, with the suggestion that disaster and order serve up equal parts of the whole, and yet slyly comic as well, as if some poor slob got tagged by parents who just happened to harbor an irresponsibly sardonic wit. And a very knowing title, too, one suspects, generously so, for its endlessly evocative possibilities seem to embrace the nature of consciousness itself, the mind’s capacity and hunger for meaning. Before we even crack the cover, we are playing along, already involved in the experience of language.

That the poems live up to the book’s hard-working title is testimony to their pleasures and to Volkman’s facility. As it turns out, Volkman is indeed a poet of consciousness. She takes for granted that her life and our lives, whatever the differences, share in common our human condition. Not ironically, the search for home, for “nearness,” drives Volkman’s poetry. And the quest begins within. In “Looking Back,” the speaker says, “I am all eye,” as in the mind’s eye, as if she were a camera recording soberly the particular images of her memory. But what does she find there? Coats and shoes, a garden she loved, her “daughter’s footsteps / on the bare swept floor,” all that “would not stay.” Two poems later, in “The Red Shoes,” that state of being is juxtaposed to a more mysterious sensibility:

Not red, she said, but the dark

of pure desire, as bright and private

as the space beneath the rib cage.

They shine! said the blind old woman.

Yes, they shine.

Volkman orchestrates the rhythms and sounds of conscious living, as opposed to easy resignation or blame, of the need to orient herself amid chaos and the inevitability of one’s demise. It’s as if Crash were the middle name given to each of us. And though chance and change, mistake and failure, and, ultimately, loss are the lay of the land, one walks away from this book saying, “that was fun.” Seriously.