In her latest collection of poems, “The Other Place You Live” (Mayapple Press, $14.95), the unique gifts of expressiveness and imagery that are the hallmarks of St. Louisan Jane O. Wayne are on full display. Wayne’s poems have appeared in “Poetry,” “The Iowa Review,” “American Scholar,” “Ploughshares” and other prestigious journals, and her previous three collections received awards and praise.

In the title poem, “The Other Place You Live,” Wayne evokes a host of emotions and feelings:

Here in the dark where lies are taken

the rough place,

to run a finger over a scar

a woollen sleeve

trying to run condensation

for a certain house,

a door with no address

in childhood.

If you try to call out,

plunged in water.

Wayne uses concrete, tactile images – a “camera dwells,” “a woollen sleeve,” “an empty bottle” – seemingly stable, everyday objects that get our attention, to evoke the “anxious question” that “keeps raising its hand in the back row.” At any given moment in one’s mind, there is an emotional subtext to the world we are observing.

Wayne’s verbal affinity invites the viewer into the depicted scene. One does not know what lies ahead, but cannot resist being drawn into the foyer, the stairwell, to what lies beyond.

A stanza in Wayne’s “Where Everything Seems Possible” describes a car that “speeds down a desert highway/ that doesn’t end, or else it soars along a causeway/headed for an island/always out of reach.”

Yes, like Robert Frost, Wayne invites us along to “take the road less traveled.” Along the way, like T. S. Eliot, she can “show us fear in a handful of dust.” She writes in the same poem of “some melody/still playing in your mind/but the lyrics gone.”

In “What the Surgeon Says” Wayne evokes fear of a more immediate, accessible kind:

Tumor, he says, noninvasive-

to talk about. And he goes on:

benign, he adds,

in under an hour, to take home

in the same skull he promises

you’ll be absent, instead of listening

No matter what Wayne writes about, she is always present. Her expressiveness is not limited to the obvious here and now. She can evoke the unheard melodies as sweetly and as vividly as those that are heard. She invites readers into the innermost reaches of her mind, giving voice to the universal joys and anxieties that walk with us on our daily journeys.

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