PERUVIAN OLD MAN, Arrowhead Vine, Mother-of-Thousands, Moneywort, Blue Passion Flower, Baby`s Tears - plants and poems with names like these make it easy to see how ripe botany is as a vehicle for investigations of history, imperialism, misogyny, language, religion, etc. Here`s how Richard Stevenson explains this in his introduction to Whatever It Is Plants Dream (Goose Lane, 65 pages, $9.95 paper): it might just be possible to read the myths we live by seeing what the plants` morphology and Latin roots have to say about what the language has been used for This collection is wide ranging and very ambitious; it is not the usual themebook in which one good idea has been extrapolated beyond one or two good poems into a full manuscript of lesser, boring ones. Theodore Roethke would have danced with this book, hugging each line scraped hard by dirt - and then had a mood swing and been jealous! Consider how these poems, while remaining playful, achieve a social critique that smarts -and all by carefully looking, carefully showing. In a single poem the roots of Christianity`s sexism and missionary lust issue from the names and structural details of "Blue Passion Flower (Passiflora caerulea)"; the poem ends by saying "Language will out. The Word extrudes its own petals"! If plants dream, it may be of such a book to exonerate them as we eliminate them, a book that points many red thumbs back at us, who seem in many ways so rootless and so reluctant to grow.