Notes from Source: Anne Carson, Nox New Directions, >35 (box) Dana Levin, Sky Burial Copper Canyon Press, >15 (paper) Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Heavenly Questions Farrar, Straus and Giroux, >13 (paper) RECENTLY I HEARD AN ESTABLISHED male poet read from a book of elegies. There is a harsh uncertainty to enjoy in passages such as this: I have a photograph of him (taken in the bush behind Bald Rock) about ten years old standing on the ground beneath a tree house. For anyone who’s been at the terminal bedside, constantly solving problems for the cancer patient, this is as, if not more, credible a stay against confusion as Carson’s refusal to rest on an answer. The answer-making – here it is answer-making, not answer-seeking – stops not when you’ve found the satisfactory solution but when you’ve brought your individual imagination of the dead into orbit with the imagination of the many dead – “the babied dead,” in Levin’s book, or all the lost soldiers Catullus mentions in the poem that begins Nox.

Further Notes: Place: Somerville Publisher: Boston Critic, Incorporated