Fear and Trembling in the Library: Five New Books. (2024)

Charms Against Lightning, by James Arthur. Copper Canyon Press, 70pp., $16.

Floating Life, by Moez Surani. Wolsak and Wynn, 96 pp., $17.

It Becomes You, by Dobby Gibson. Graywolf Press, 96 pp., $15.

Vanitas, Rough, by Lisa Russ Spaar. Persea Books, 64 pp.,$15.95.

A Larger Country, by Tomas Q. Morin. American Poetry Review, 80 pp.,$14.

In literary biopics, the bookshelves of poets are usually depictedas soothing backdrops, smooth walnut cases bathed in a mild goldenlight, before which the poet feverishly composes her latest work ofgenius.

In real life, as every writer knows, bookshelves are frequentlysources of the purest fear and revulsion: each new verse or sentence onemanages to grind out is immediately confronted by the hundreds ofthousands of superlative pages gathered on the far wall, and on the baddays, every book on the shelf seems to be asking whether it'sreally worth the effort. Or, as Dobby Gibson puts it in a book underreview here, "From the back of the books I love and am terrifiedby, / the great thinkers stare back at me / with little encouragement. /I am prepared to follow them anywhere!" In other words, no one isimmune to what Harold Bloom famously termed the anxiety of influence.Yet this does not mean that all poets acknowledge that influence in thesame way, or to the same extent. In fact, as the five books belowdemonstrate, a poet's handling of her relationship with herforebears can itself create fresh opportunities for distinction.

 I 

James Arthur's debut collection, Charms Against Lightning, isso confident that it almost seems to have sprung fully formed from thepen of its creator, though the crowded acknowledgments page testifies tothe fact that it has been many years in the making. It is worth thewait. Arthur writes in a seasoned voice that still leaves plenty of roomfor humor and surprise. He also seems to be in no hurry to pay homage tohis literary elders. While many first books tend to sprinkle in thenames of well-known poets as a way of offering tribute to their mentors(or in hopes of assembling a pedigree), this book does the opposite.Arthur drops only two names in the entire volume, Richard Hugo and W.H.Auden. Hugo is only called up to act as the straight man inArthur's joke: an epigraph quoting his prohibition of semicolons(from the handbook of poetic style The Triggering Town) is followed bythe poem "In Defense of the Semicolon" which gleefully deploysthe forbidden punctuation at every opportunity.

The invocation of Auden requires a bit more finesse. Arthurexplicitly acknowledges the English poet's influence in"Aspirations," a nearly imageless expository poem thatstruggles, with startling bluntness, to articulate the ultimate goals ofthe practicing poet: "to address mystery / without beingmysterious, / never expecting anyone / to know, speaking only foryourself // but not being self-centered, conducting yourself / as ifyour work matters, knowing nothing // makes nothing happen ..."That last line is a clear nod to the famous line ("For poetrymakes nothing happen") from one of Auden's most familiarpoems, his elegy for WB. Yeats. In "The Names of Flowers" onthe previous page, Arthur makes a slightly less overt gesture with theline, "The roar in the garden is the grave," hearkening toAuden's brooding pronouncement "And the crack in the tea-cupopens / A lane to the land of the dead," from the poem "As IWalked Out One Evening."

Incidentally, it was Richard Hugo who named Auden as one of the veryrare poets witty enough to make "music conform to truth," andwho counseled young writers aspiring to greatness, or at least to afirst book, to prioritize the poem's "music" over itsmessage. In Charms Against Lightning, Arthur has heeded Hugo'sadvice on description if not on punctuation. The poem"Avocado," for instance, opens with a simple yet lyricalcouplet: "In a bowl, blind as stones. / In their soft-skinnedhides, holding seeds." The second stanza departs from its subjecthalfway through:

 Carving an avocado makes a C-section, and the meat of the fruit slicks the stone. My brother and I were cut from the womb. Our mother would have died, twice. 

This is the backbone of a smart poem: that sudden pivot that allowsthe reader to see an object from a different perspective, as the poetchanges the palette or shifts the field of view.

But Arthur then goes even further, presenting a third and finalstanza that is harder to connect to the previous two: "Happiness.You want seasons / and radio, want swallows dogfighting, / want to walkin a leather coat, / maple keys spinning down." There is musichere--the autumn scenery of swallows, chilly walks and maple trees--butit is that last image of the spinning maple "keys" (the wingeddouble seeds that helicopter to the ground in early fall) that bringsthe entire poem together in a single line, as it suggests not only thestones of the avocadoes (both are seeds) but also the births of thespeaker and his brother.

Many of Arthur's poems also display a metaphysical penchant fornaming and describing things and then immediately negating them, withresults that are imagistically a bit anticlimactic (how could they notbe?), but in other respects fascinating and fruitful. The book'sfixation with absence is revealed early on, in poems such as "GhostLife," which follows the speaker's shadow as it lengthens andnarrows to near-invisibility, and "Utopia," in which thepoem's antihero has finally achieved a longed-for anonymity("This is another country, not an ordinary place, / where a man, nomatter how exceptional / he felt, would finally be erased")."Against Emptiness," which closes Part II, puts a morecomplicated spin on the concept, first declaring its titular subject"Denser than a dog. Volatile / like a torpedo, harder than a punchline," but ending with an enigmatic observation: "Can a manbuild a tower / out of air alone? He can. And the wind / will blow itaway."

This sounds a little like the kind of statement that Zen acolytesare supposed to meditate on until they achieve enlightenment. But italso seems to imply that just because towers of air can be blown awaydoesn't mean we shouldn't build them. Arthur returns to thisidea in "In Praise of Noise," which describes the cacophony ofthe busy world in loving detail, then quickly reduces it to "asymphony / no one wrote, confounding every pattern." In the finallines, the speaker then implores someone or something--the very noiseitself, perhaps--to "teach me the song that no one can sing,someday / to be the song of everything." This is a roundabout wayof putting it, but then again it is no surprise that a book containingno less than three poems with the one-word title "Vertigo"should be gazing at the world through an intentionally wobbly lens. Andultimately, Charms Against Lightning does seem to be genuinely pursuingthe goal that Arthur states in the stylistically singular"Aspirations": to "address mystery / without beingmysterious." Halfway through "At Klipsan Beach," in aline that echoes the oft-quoted opening line of "One Art" byElizabeth Bishop, the speaker declares, "We are, and then wearen't; / that's the mortal art." There's that peskysemicolon again. But the candor of these lines also imparts somenecessary element of truth to Arthur's airy, intricate music.

 II 

Unlike the oblique epigraphs that open many books of Americanpoetry, the one chosen by Canadian poet Moez Surani for his second book,A Floating Life, provides a surprisingly clear glimpse of the subjectmatter of the poems that follow it. It is lifted from theseventeenth-century Japanese writer Asai Ryoi, but its portrait of youngwriters "singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting ourselves injust floating, floating, caring not a whit for the poverty staring us inthe face" is a fairly timeless description of the itinerant,booze-soaked existence that creative teenagers and aging bohemians liketo imagine is the poet's true calling. More to the point, thisdescription also captures the persona that Surani adopts in many of thepoems of Floating Life. As the speaker declares in "TrinityBellwoods," the penultimate poem, "Some say I am a great poet/ but today, I am a great drunk / or great at being like a littleboy." Kerouac couldn't have said it better, and readers'responses to Surani's book may substantially depend on what theythink of the lifestyle that inspires it.

When Surani's speaker is not drinking, he is traveling."Trinity Bellwoods," referring to a neighborhood in Ontario,is one of the very few poems that do not take place on a continent otherthan North America; the poems that precede it recount days and nightsspent in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Egypt, India (Benares and Mumbai), SouthKorea, and a handful of other places through which the poet presumablyhas passed--or floated, as the case may be. Many of these cities,especially in Western Europe, serve as no more than stopping-points onwhat appears to be either a series of travel fellowships or a veryspeedy vacation, with the brevity of the speaker's stay in the cityindicated by the brevity of his ode. Thus the early poems"Barcelona Harbour" ("So many / boats!") and"Parisian Graffiti" ("Pulling out, / I left my mark / onyour city wall.") take up, in their entirety, no more than fivelines. Similarly, the untitled series of fragmentary poems in Part II,which begins with a litany of cities ("Boston Buffalo / Seoul MilanOttawa"), finds the speaker traveling by train betweencities--Budapest, Prague, Frankfurt, Rome--more often than he remains inany one of them long enough to write about it.

"Barcelona Harbor" and "Parisian Graffiti" arealso the first of many haiku-like poems in Floating Life, which occurmost frequently in Part III. Here the book settles down, at leasttemporarily, in South Korea, and opens with a six-line poem presagingthe placid surrealism that East Asia sometimes presents to Westerneyes:

 Walking to Munbaek, a dog barks at his other self behind the mountain. An ostrich frightens me. 

In a nod to the elements of classical haiku, Surani often invokesthe names of regions or towns to anchor these drifting phrases to aplace--"Ilchulbong / and the yellow rapeseed fields,""Giunsa's elaborate, pale terraces." Part III is theshortest of the book's four sections, but its brevity placesSurani's abilities as a poet in the most favorable light,particularly his skill at crafting unadorned, simple sentences thatstill convey warmth and sensuality. Here are two stanzas of the untitledpoem that ends the section:

 how from your room to mine, you will have laid flowers that I pass too quickly over to give either foot a petal's pleasure. And inhaling the air around your dark hair, I will stand with all my selves, and call you mother, sister, wife, daughter. 

The language here is soft and musical, with both stanzas using theso-called feminine ending for the slant rhyme of "pleasure"and "daughter." Yet the structure of the poem has an austerequality, with no line containing more than six syllables until the lasttwo lines, which expand to accommodate the speaker's almost mythicvision of his lover.

This dreamlike sensuality pervades much of Floating Life, with thespeaker adopting a mode of expression that may remind readers (forbetter or worse) of the Coleman Barks translations of thethirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi. The poem "YouWanted," for instance, opens with the line "You leave mehungry for you" and ends, "Come. / Tilt yourself into me. / Ican bear you. // Pure red. Pure white. / My vessel empty / save foryou." Later, in "Narration of a Scroll," the speakerasks, "How did I get up the energy / to lie with you in suchhavoc?" For the most part, the writing here is serene and assured,and visually interesting enough that the few missteps, such as adescription of a starlit night that ends with the disappointing cliche"I loved / them and felt / so free," can be overlooked.

Things start to unravel a bit when Surani sets himself the task ofcomposing a longer poem. The overwritten "The Reunion,"describing two former lovers who meet to make love again after a longabsence, exemplifies the problem. Having set the scene and situated itsplayers ("He touches her aged waist. // They find a seam of air,between kisses, and / a bed. Their legs found it."), the poem thenstalls, unsure where to go next, and instead gazes about the roomdelivering a series of metaphor-heavy snapshots: "And her hip is afaucet / and his arms are a hoop," and as things progress, he"manages her wealth of hair / with the drawers of his chest"an operation that sounds both awkward and a little painful.

Perhaps this simply betrays a desire for Surani to write more of theslender poems that remain the strongest of Floating Life, but "TheReunion" seems to accomplish its sought-after portrait of rekindledlove in the single couplet that closes the poem: "She sleeps withher mouth open / and each breath verifies his hand." More lineslike these, and Surani's next book will be worth the cost of a fewmore travel fellowships.

 III 

In the final lines of the long titular poem that concludes DobbyGibson's It Becomes You, the speaker finds himself alone in a movietheater on a Wednesday, watching the closing scene of a science fictionmovie in which the aliens have apparently won: "The triumphantaliens wander / what's left of Wall Street / as you sit there justlong enough / to read a few peculiar names / from the seemingly endlesscredits stream / out of some invisible bond / of courtesy and curiosity..." The scene is sardonic but also strangely private, a wry glanceat Hollywood's latest contribution to the perennially lucrativedestruction-of-the-earth genre, paired with a fleeting moment of vagueemotional alertness as the screen goes black and the credits start toroll.

The scene also provides a neat illustration of the two stylisticreference points between which Gibson's third book frequentlyshuttles. Generally speaking, It Becomes You is traceable to the chattyand amiable yet highly deflective style whose elder statesman is DeanYoung--a style that originated with the famous first trio of the NewYork School (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara), and whichhas since been christened with variations on the"second-generation" theme. It is a diffuse poetic fashion(some might say contagious), easy enough to imitate but difficult tomake meaningful, and poems written a la maniere de Young tend to inspiredelight and disappointment in relatively equal measure. For his part,Gibson is evidently eager to acknowledge his debt: the poem "WhatFollows Us Now Must Soon Enough be Carried" finds him reminiscingabout eating oysters with Young in San Francisco, before the latterreceived a heart transplant in 2011, "kept alive in Texas / by abox of valves and lithium batteries / serving the functions of a humanheart."

Many of the poems in It Becomes You remain committed, whetherconsciously or not, to what Tony Hoagland branded this"skittery" manner of speaking. The middle of "Waking inSomeone Else's Clothes" provides a characteristic example:

 We should at some point introduce ourselves, for though this is no longer sleep, it still feels like something to wake from, the sun repeating yesterday's pattern on the hardwood floor repeating yesterday's pattern on the earth, the cold making you want to give everything away except your unmade bed and a phone number. Deep inside these words are all the rituals and rites reenacted by their mere use, and deep inside the poet is the desire to celebrate and f*ck that sh*t up. It's as easy as saying glass. 

There is nothing objectionable about these lines: they are cleverbut not too risky, and they were clearly crafted with patience and care.Yet we long for something more. Poems such as this, after the meanderingtrail of odd remarks and stage-whispered asides, often conclude with arelatively irony-free line or two that strikes the reader asrefreshingly honest and plain as a glass of warm milk. But the shift hasthe whiff of a setup. This happens at the end of "At theReady," which begins with the signature evasiveness of Ashbery 3.0("Hush now, little one, daddy's flushed his Ambien. / And nowthe river dreams! / The beer chases the Bloody Mary, / but what freshceremony will chase all of that?") but ends with the cloyingobservation that "The binoculars at the overlook / may be worth thepay-per-view after all, / the scene unforgettable, if only for the feel/ of the snowflakes on your lashes." A similar finale is staged in"Self-Reliance," which starts strong but ends with "theDecember dark, / which is the place I'll wait for you in the end, /our last candle in my hand."

Happily these lines are far from the best that Gibson has to offer.It Becomes You is replete with poems--"In Case Of,""Nocturne," "Beauty Supply,""Self-Reliance," "The Briars," and many others--thatmay assume an air of casual talkiness, but whose aims are more urgentand, yes, more honest. After taking stock of a life that has grown"a little longer / and more worn at the edges" the speaker of"In Case Of" recounts the events of the previous night in acadenced and quietly elegant passage:

 Last night, unable to name the trees by the river, we watched them shake in the wind and listened as their fruit surrendered, gently drumming the earth. The plants that had been set out by day were brought in for the night. The cicadas had fallen silent, though we didn't hear, exactly, when, or realize until much later what we had been missing. 

The language here is so elemental and rhythmic that it takes amoment to realize something unusual has happened--unusual enough, atleast, to silence the cicadas--though what that something is never quiteemerges. It leaves us faintly unsettled, not only in that final silencebut also in its tacit conclusion that the task of drawing meaning fromour lives remains forever unfinished.

Gibson also has a striking gift for coining instantly memorablephrases that turn the mirror directly on the reader herself. Put simply,his best poems show us as we are, not as we imagine ourselves. In theopening to "Self-Reliance," he observes, "At some point,which is another way / of saying now, your tireless indecision / overwhat to do with your life / becomes precisely what you have done withyour life." The middle of "Postscript" includes the bluntdeclaration "You can't bear to be alone, / but this is thebest evidence you have / that you're still here." And in theclosing lines of "Hum," Gibson imagines a time "Beforethere was a friend / to pat me gently on the shoulder / in that way thatlets you know you're loved / but also being quietly asked togo." These statements are quiet but firm, and they stand as awelcome counterpoint to the comic-anxious ruminations that are scatteredthroughout the book. As Gibson writes in the long poem that ends thisvolume, "the cardinals work together / in obscurity like littlepoets ... They make no sign, other than the very absence of gesture /that has always been their most urgent signal." Such signals are bytheir nature easy to miss, but in this voluble book it is precisely thelines most likely to be overlooked that are also the mostcommanding.

 IV 

It is tempting to say that the language in Lisa Russ Spaar'sfourth collection of poems is brilliantly alive, and that the bookshould be read by as many people as possible, and simply to leave it atthat. To add anything more is probably just gilding the lily. Yet alittle gilding is unavoidable: Vanitas, Rough offers up page after pageof complex, inventive poems thicketed with vivid words and lucid turnsof phrase. Here are the first ten lines of "ChristmasStoup":

 Ink slurs into byssal threads, split blue caskets of mussels scapular in ritual archipelago, butter, cream, the chowder pot a holy trencher on a night stour, bitter with advent, wilted cruxes, tarragon, bassinet of clamshell, shucked, fragile saddlebags, houses primeval: slughead, mantle, foot, all vulnerable, indomitable. 

For many readers (including this one), Spaar's poems cannot befully appreciated without a dictionary close at hand. Yet even those whocan't be bothered to look up "byssal" (relating to thebyssus, or silky filaments with which bivalves and mollusks cling torocks) or "stour" (strong or powerful) cannot miss thepoem's thick consonance, its glut of sibilants--byssal, mussels,scapular, cruxes, bassinet, clamshell, saddlebags--that bind theseimages together for eight rapid-fire lines before the softer Latinatesof "mantle," "vulnerable," and"indomitable" emerge to clear the air and let in some light.The early work of Geoffrey Hill comes to mind here, as do the poems ofAmy Clampitt (if only for Spaar's sheer zeal in the sounds wordsmake), as well as--and not only because of his recent and still-painfulpassing--the earthy, layered, and stately language of Seamus Heaney.

There is much to discuss in Spaar's poetry, though one aspectthat announces itself from the very title is her fixation with theimagery of religion and religious ritual: a vanitas, aside from beingthe Latin word for vanity, is a genre of painting that collects symbolicimages of transience and death, most notably the memento mori of thehuman skull. Spaar is no moralist, though, and she usually invokes thelanguage of the sacred in order to subvert it, as in these lines from"St. Saint":

 All Hallows, solemn close of paschal drawers, wounded stare, the all-out decking of box stores. Fa la la, la la. O beloved departed, la-la, la-la, obligate me, after work, a long day in a body, passing beneath blooded lintels, maples, red oaks-- 

Whatever spiritual significance once attached to this jumble ofsacred days--All Hallows' Day, Christmas, Easter, Passover--seemsto have been supplanted by the holiday shopping season. "St.Saint" is one of a total of nine "St." poems, including"St. Chardonnay," "St. Vogue," "St. Bed ofSnow," and "St. Protagonist," among others, all of whichtake the language of religion not as a reference point but as a point ofdeparture. In "St. Tulip," as the flowers bloom they become"shiva-limbed, / sucking up water, they elongate, // ambrosialpneumatics." In "St. Chardonnay," Spaar declares,"Let this be merely / a drunken poem, // let a mythic figure sidlein, / cosmic, // marigolds in the mouth / & magnificent."

Yet when Spaar considers the secular, her language is no lesselectric. The tight, compact poem "Whether" opens with threecouplets that are as mesmerizing as they are surreal:

 Out of a kit of bones, the dog's half-cast opiate eyes ask can't you hear the moths, pelting the pearglass? & then there is nothing else I can hear. Bulbs opal and ignited as felted anus-stars, snow, spot the porch, blast the poplars: the thumbscrew aortal pulse of Philomela. 

Such abundance of imagery nearly overwhelms the senses--who else butperhaps Frederick Seidel would liken snowflakes to "feltedanus-stars"? Yet Spaar also recognizes the potential for such anonslaught to leave readers not dazzled but blinded, and the poem soonshifts to focus on its true subject, a mother's slow descent intothe shadows of dementia, with language that puts a more banal face onthe surreal: "Whose fork is this? my mother asked me, pointing toher cane / in the dark of the backseat last week."

Such juxtapositions of the humdrum and the outlandish produce someof the book's most memorable poems. "Bone Orchard LunchHour" deserves mention here, as does "God's Gym,"which begins with the speaker driving in rush hour "past thestrip-mall fitness center," with its neon letter "L" gonedark, but then swiftly embarks on a vision of the Shakers, the Christiansect known for both minimalist furniture design and their physicallydynamic worship services, with their "glossolalia / of twitch andstomp ... the upper room of the heart emptying / into tongues ofesophageal fire." One could list many other examples here, but letit suffice to say that Vanitas, Rough is a rich, rewarding book frombeginning to end. If Spaar was ever merely a poet to watch, that time islong past. She is, and has been for many years, a poet to read--with adictionary if you wish, but also, and more importantly, with joy andgratitude.

 V 

The title of Tomas Q. Morin's first book, A Larger Country,borrowed from Joseph Brodsky's poem "Variation in V,"reappears near the end of the book in the excellent "Idiom of theHero," a cento poem (composed by fusing the verses of other writersinto a single work) with a title from Wallace Stevens and tercets builtfrom lines by John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hart Crane, FernandoPessoa, and many others. "These things I have--a withered hand--/foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges, / an undisturbed,unbreathing flame, // and tiny sky creatures buried under the snow. /They represent, I fancy, a version of heaven; / we commit them tomemory, which is a larger country."

Historical memory plays a sizable (and at times almost occlusive)role in Morin's book: true to the spirit of Brodsky'smetaphor, many of the poems in A Larger Country seek to resurrect names,places, and events--particularly those in Eastern Europe that sufferedthrough the brutal legacy of Soviet rule--that time has begun to erase.The book opens with "Laika," named for the most famous of theso-called "Soviet space dogs" strapped into shuttles by theKhrushchev regime, but Morin is more concerned with Eastern Europeanpoets whose lives were cut short, such as Miklos Radnoti and IsaakBabel, as well as those like Czeslaw Milosz who were fortunate enough tofind a new life elsewhere.

Despite this sober subject matter, Morin's poetry is astwenty-first-century American as it comes: conversational, affablydigressive, and full of winding sentences that make small rivulets andeddies for his poems to drift through before drawing back to the subjectat hand. Thus the odd horticultural fantasia "While Waiting for theResurrection" finds Milosz "sleeping in the garden / behindour building ... held close by last season's tomatoes, your quietface / already overrun with summer's weeds," and embarks on aseries of observations concerning the benefits of Milosz's strongbones and "good Polish clay" on the garden's fertility,before thanking him in the final lines for "the salty soup youhelped me make tonight / with the wild onions I pulled from yourfeet." The poem "Our Prophets" ventures farther afield,beginning with the speaker "reading / Gorky's remembrance ofTolstoy and devouring chicken / on a blanket in view of the muddywaters," then drifting into an argument in praise of homemade keylime pie (in contrast to "the impostor with the God-awful filling /tinted green by they of the white aprons / and souffle hats"), andfinally turning back to dwell on an obscure remark by Tolstoy that Gorkyrecorded, concerning a talking parrot that spoke the dialect of avanished tribe, which prompts Morin to ask, "what bird will speakfor us if not our monkish / parakeet souring in the oak above us / likea cheap piece of pie / that calls out 'hungry, hungry,hungry'?"

As the titles of these two poems suggest, A Larger Country alsodabbles in religious imagery, with varying success. A poem ostensiblyabout fly-fishing, "A Model for the Priesthood," finds thespeaker "baptizing" trout fillets in butter after his friendhas reeled them in, making him "an American John // to his AmericanJesus." A few pages later, in "Egg Ministry," a henhouseis full of "the faithful / clucking about the rapture, / andwhether heaven is truly shallow and fresh / like a box of straw waitingfor birth." These lines are hit-and-miss; satire is notMorin's forte.

His more effective poems, rather, are invariably subtler, such as"Winter," an ekphrasis based on a landscape by the FlemishBaroque painter Abel Grimmer, which begins with a reminder of howpaintings once functioned as aids to devotion: "There is a churchwith a steeple and houses whose roofs / mirror the slope of thechurch's roof which is / meant to dominate the center of thecanvas; / such was the nature of faith in the sixteenth century."Later in the poem, when this seemingly bucolic tableau is revealed asone of chaos and disorder, faith provides no solution. Instead,"you tell yourself the ice will crack, the snow melt, / and this issomething which makes you feel better / because it is a scene you havewitnessed before." The ambivalence of that last line--the coldcomfort derived from knowing that violence, like the seasons, willalways recur--leaves us uneasy, but in an age when moral certainty ismore or less impossible to come by, this seems a legitimate offering fora poem to make.

The best poem in A Larger Country may be the eight-page sonnetsequence "North Farm," which broods over a small group ofrefugees--possibly Jewish emigrants escaping the Nazi regime--as theyseek shelter in a war-torn town that seems no safer than the place theyhave fled. The poem opens with "black-gray bands of thick clouds /gathering like sheep thinned out with a razor," and infuses each ofits settings with similarly ominous imagery: a street is littered with"the badly broken bodies of birds," and an eerily emptyoutdoor market holds "all of the animals who've been chosen /because they are the youngest and therefore the most tender." Thepoem sacrifices a bit of force with its intentional vagueness--we arenever quite sure whether this is a ghetto, a labor camp, or merely awretched village razed afresh by each army that passes through it--butit* language is visceral and unflinching, and the speaker's wearytone is surprisingly believable, even though coming from a poet ofMorin's young age. Ultimately, this volume may be the work of apoet who is still finding his footing, but in its grappling with thetragedies of the twentieth century as well as its absurdities, it alsoaims higher than many first books of its author's generation. Thatalone makes A Larger Country worth reading, and Morin a poet of genuinepromise.