THE DIARY OF EMILY DICKINSON

THE DIARY OF EMILY DICKINSON Jamie Fuller (Mercury House, $18) Fuller tries to provide a make-believe peek into the reclusive poet's enigmatic life: Emily Dickinson's family and purported loves, her concerns and joys about her writing, her progressive attitudes about women's roles, and her hatred of housework. But Fuller's writing pales beside Dickinson's (whose wouldn't?), and the disparity breaks the spell. Fuller writes that ''cats are inscrutable beasts,'' but the real Dickinson wrote about ''finding Assassins for them.'' Such comparisons are inevitable: Dickinson's real poems-her ''letter to the World''- tower over Fuller's well-informed inventiveness. C+ -David Ball