The poems in this collection that I like best are the ones that intertwine the speaker’s voice with another voice, with quotes and descriptions from other writers: I like the layers of those poems, the interplay of voices and places and times, how now slips into then or vice versa. Like “Posthumous Man,” (ignore the terrible formatting on that page!) which starts with the line, “I hate the world,” the narrator saying it, which would perhaps be off-putting, too much angst (p 18). But then that line shows up again as a quotation from a letter by Keats, who is also (along with the narrator, I guess) the “posthumous man” of the title, and suddenly, I like the whole poem a lot more, how it moves from the narrator’s disappointments to Keats’s disappointments and back again, how it contains both the domestic and the wild, how satisfying its form is. Other poems I like for the same reasons: “Horse Madness”, with bits of Virgil, “1st My Children,” about Shaker gift drawings (oh man I am a sucker for poems about visual art), “Stranging,” with bits of Cabeza de Vaca and bits of Edward Taylor (this might be my favorite poem in the whole book), and “One Willow”, with bits of Paracelsus and others.
Which isn’t to say that the poems that don’t include other voices aren’t often pleasing. I like the specificity of them, how full of the natural world they are: the names of plants (wake-robin, hedge apple, tulip-poplar, jewelweed) and of animals (grackles, wrens), the way a coyote looks in a field in winter. I like, too, the stories some of them tell, like “Old Man Throwing a Ball” and “On Parlance” (about an ambulance at the next-door neighbor’s house) and the title poem, too.
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