"]Open Interval[" by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is one of five nominees for the National Book Award in Poetry. The winners will be announced Wednesday in New York.

"Bop: The North Star," the opening poem in this exceptional collection -- which fully deserves the National Book Award nomination -- illustrates Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon's deft use of the tropes of astronomy to locate her lyric self in a new realm of indeterminacy.

"Yes, the springtime needed you. Many a star was waiting / for your eyes only," goes the refrain, borrowed from Rilke, but the earthy individuality is brokered by the more transcendent, "Oh, Harriet [Tubman], the stars / throw down shanks--: teach the sonnet's a cell --: now try to escape --"

Like Ezra Pound at his rhythmic best, she converts the raw data of fields of knowledge to pure musicality, to nourish the lyric self:

Poise begins here:

in cinders, in rhyme, in splintering beauty into this

and this--: the image at my throat: the summer's pitching

constellations: the ten o'clock scholar's midnight lesson.

The poet, originally from Florida, has, like Tubman, headed north, but the setting is the Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York, where she teaches poetry to prisoners. The poem illustrates the tensions between the corporeal body and its utopian attractors, the choices made to illuminate a steady core.

The poet shares her name with RR Lyrae stars, which serve as galactic measuring standards because of their variable brightness. Six poems use RR Lyrae as the motif, to catch the energy of this unique characteristic of variability serving measurability. In "RR Lyrae: Will," the poet says:

It makes me sad, the things I wanted--:

love's gorgeous force:-- a tight fat cloud of blue

hydrangea--: someone coaxed the soil to color

] the universe:-- cancer of the hallelu:-- [

The outward-facing brackets are the mathematical symbol for the open interval, which means an interval that excludes the end points. The poet uses the symbol sparingly, typically to protest against her body feeling hemmed in.

The endpoints, in the case of the open continuum of the lyric self, might be body, name, identity, various categories imposed on the poet. Sometimes the open interval encloses only the name "Phillis [Wheatley]."

She picks this up in "RR Lyrae: Matter":

One day I realized I believe--:

the space in everything is God: that force

of present absence...] old fashioned: distance: squinting it into view [

The ostensible subject is the missing husband, but the scope is exhaustive: "Sometimes the absences in us seem so profuse, / I wonder we don't pass through wood."

The poet also addresses deaf astronomer John Goodricke (1764-86), a discoverer of RR Lyrae stars like Algol. In "Dear John: (Winking Demon)," we learn of his total attunement:

Tensed for the sensation

you fear: this must be hearing. She [the star] turns your whole body

to an ear. Each morning you wake, stiff with listening.

Goodricke laid the foundations for the measurement of the universe. The poet's attraction for the rampant possibility of the Age of Enlightenment is no coincidence.

The least representative poem, "Poem for Amadou Diallo" -- a rare reference to public sorrow -- again ponders the paradox of the open interval. In the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building, Diallo involuntarily meets "fame's pop and flare and flash." His after-effect is described thus:

Your own blood fills your chest until you are nothing but

poems and petals left on Wheeler Street

and your mother's courtroom silence

as she learns to hold her heart.

Diallo will remain as omnipotent memory as long as his name is alive, even if the body was martyred. The poem is the antithesis of narcissistic realism, which thieves from contemporary events and history alike to construct a flat, void aura of complaint. This poet is not having any part of this disability.

Van Clief-Stefanon won the 2001 Cave Canem Prize for her first collection, "Black Swan" (Pittsburgh), a more standard recitation of the minority poet's struggle through personal disadvantages.

"] Open Interval [" represents a quantum leap in imagination, as she has discovered that the more distance one attains from the hardened self, the clearer it becomes to the observer. Her attention has swung from the relaxed narrative line to formal perfection.

Her influences include Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton and Michael Harper, but her unique terseness is saved again and again by the innocent instinct to make the next impossible connection.

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