As the title The Bones of the Earth implies, Carol Jane Bangs’ concerns are basic, archetypal: birth, death, ancestry, child-bearing, love, work. In contradistinction to a poetry of urban alienation, The Bones of the Earth evokes a poignant, yet no less uneasy awareness of nature’s influence. The book opens with poems describing the Pacific Northwest, where the poet’s family has lived for four generations: oyster strings dangling in icy rows, their scaffolding propped by booms of thick fir and western cedar, a meadow shimmering and unearthly in the winter solstice.…