This third collection of Kevin Cantwell's poetry is characterized less by formalism than by the lyric poem as an exploration of the process of making art. The title poem recounts an anecdote about the mid-century painter Robert Motherwell and the nature of the real, and the opening poem returns to the familiar landscape of the Florida Panhandle where the speaker crosses unmarked rivers at night while getting disoriented, then stymied, by waters that cannot be crossed. Intimate poems from family life give pointed texture to the more meditative encounters within the paragraphing of longer stanzas. An exchange between brothers who cannot afford to bury their mother is overheard while they toy with a gull by throwing bits of shell in the air as if it were bread. A longer poem in five sections experiments with the space a poem establishes on the page and which pressures the kind of poem each of its sections make; ""You can turn your life around,"" that poem asserts, ""but not the ship of night."" As the poet has inscribed elsewhere, the lives of other poets move through the imagery, forming an allegiance to the life of the mind. The elegy is, therefore, characteristic, in one instance for the late Seaborn Jones, and in another example, a poem built upon couplets after a claim, via the late James Merrill, that one should not wish to know what lies ahead in life.

Poetry. "The phrase 'Russian novel' suggests thickness, density, and richness. All those terms apply to Cantwell's poetry or, more precisely, to the life in the poems. These are active pieces that plunge into the thick of things and pulse with motion, regardless of whether the setting is past or present. They show as they describe or recollect, and they don't recollect in any apparent tranquility or with regret. 'A late cousin speaks, ' walking and talking the life of addiction--the needle, coffee, cannabis, the white rock--that culminates in the recognition of happiness, however sordid, however self-isolating. Old friends reconnect at a convention's hotel bar, last to be seated and staying so far beyond closing that the management gives them an unsubtle hint, 'and yet we linger.' Three poems realize incidents from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a big paragraph of which is this book's epigraph. Poems on the deaths of artists and friends, even when they're very long gone, indeed--see 'Marlowe in Italy'--hail their subjects' follies and vices equally with their achievements. This is poetry teeming with light, darkness, color, movement, heat, cold, sound, and silence. Reading it is like watching a complicated, demanding movie or, in full consciousness, life--Ray Olson, Booklist

Poetry. "So focused, so distilled the articulation of these poems-the details of country matters so strangely noticed, the dreams so strongly nourished-that initially we are at a loss (though quite happy to be there) to know what to make of this new diction..Though spoken out of a solitude and into one, Cantwell's fresh-cut verses achieve a sort of community of perception, 'untethered from familiar darkness, ' as the poet says. This new poet says it all. Anew" -Richard Howard