The Latest Monument

Arranged in five sections, the poems of The Latest Monument begin in enigma-bucolic night sounds, fearful wails of a neighborhood fire whistle, the taunting of older children, the throbbing of a fire hose. Adulthood seems to come as a surprise, and with it deaths-forebears', a beloved friend's, beloved elders', a ruby-crowned kinglet's. The collection continues through a series of love poems-love and aging, really. And then, in the section "Call It Embrace," poems of forbearance: a couple locked together due to infirmity, an elderly former wartime nurse for whom even locomotives must stop. If the early poems seem self-focused, nearly all of these later ones celebrate "effort expended." The poem that gives the book its title watches the creation of pencil portrait of a young child whose life must stand in, to an extent, for the older sister who has not survived. Yet the book ends in arrivals. There is often the touching of water, and an accompanying feeling of benediction-the sense of being welcomed into a sense of being more profound than any individual self, something 'Given by Other Years.' You'll find plenty of rhyming, but also a more relaxed voice given to sentences that roll through many phrases to their fulfillment.