Women in the Garden, by Mary Lou Sanelli. Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press. $13.95.

Women in the Garden, Mary Lou Sanelli's fourth collection of poem, lights on a winning combination: cultivating the soil and renewing the language. The gardener's routine, like that of the poet, sharpens observation and fosters the contemplative spirit.

Sanelli's inwardness is largely responsible for making these poems so attractive to the reader. It moves them beyond mere description and gives them depth, nuance, and surprise.

Many of the poems focus in some way on the garden, but the situations are varied and unpredictable: a woman collapses and dies by the compost pile; two women trade the fruits of their labors; a man suffers a heart attack while tending his bonsai; the poem's speaker favors investing in lavender over Microsoft. Gradually, the metaphorical extensions accumulate to constitute a world in little with all the realities of love and friendship, injury and forgiveness, sex and marriage, disability and disease, birth and death. Even the single poem not set in the Northwest, New Orleans, is integrated smoothly into the thematic context by observations on the city's flowers and the contrast between Bourbon Street's glitzy attractions and the down-to-earth practicality of the Pacific Northwest.

To some extent, the mind's "weather," one's everyday moods and emotions, is as much outside the individual's control as the elements. Wind, rain, and sun may help or hinder growth, but the key to success in both gardening and poetry is a ready receptivity, something Sanelli brings to the ordinary happenings of each day.

In the title poem, for example, Sanelli watches an elderly neighbor drenching weeds and watering plants well past their prime. But instead of being judgmental, she notes the woman's "rosy scalp, visible through her hair / as a wound, pink as a tropical morning." She reflects on the serenity that seems to issue from the neighbor's activity and considers the way women's lives intertwine.

This sense of solitude and community permeates the collection, occasionally providing flashes of humor or glints of mystery. In Hiding from a Friend, the reader finds the poet, in an attempt to preserve her precious writing time, crouching on all fours in her bathroom while a friend knocks at the front door. At other times, she seems positively starved for company, as in Visit During Fiddletunes. Here, her annual exchange with a friend must be sandwiched between sessions of the visitor's music workshops, and the clock leaves too little opportunity to catch up on the past year's events.

Although it is usually dangerous to read a poem as if it were autobiographical, most of these offerings do appear to grow from direct experience, giving the reader a hand up on what some consider a difficult genre. The diction is straightforward and the informing spirit, resilient and affectionate. The life of Port Townsend, with its neighborly concern, its gray skies, and its short growing season, ripples through these pages.

One of my personal favorites comes early in the book: This Other Way. It reminds me of a comment by the late William Stafford in response to a poem by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken. Frost's poem ends with these evocative lines:

Quoting those lines, Stafford observed, "That's the great thing about poetry. It allows you to go back and take that other road, if only in imagination." In that spirit, Sanelli "tries on" the life of a neighbor whose guests, kitchen, china, even her son, she appropriates for the duration of the poem. And although Sanelli declares herself "childless by choice," it is clear that her maternal instinct is alive and well. From time to time, a certain ambivalence on the subject of motherhood crops up, notably in Pilgrimage and Helen and Two Toddlers, Emma and Max.

In addition to her own writing, Sanelli has contributed richly to the literary life of the Seattle region with her Sundays at One Poetry Series, held in Port Townsend in the restored downtown Rose Theater. The series is now beginning its sixteenth year.