Also in Arcadia

Andrew Mulvania's Arcadia lies tucked into the rich landscape of rural central Missouri-its cornfields and falling-down barns, its rickety old river towns with their repair shops and crackling blacktop roads. Like the earliest Arcadians, this fine young poet renders the rough, precarious world with formalizing grace, odic, elegiac, tender, and dignified. He fuses high literary allusiveness with hands-on knowledge of farm life, and he writes so well he makes the complexity of his project, its "strict and tangled intricacies," as clear as the glassy mirror of a morning pond. Also in Arcadia is a belated pastoral, a new gift brought forward from an old, enchanted, living world.