Ascension Theory

Terse, serious evocations of travels and landscapes%E2%80%94most of them in snowy regions%E2%80%94open out into spiritual yearnings, or else hint at harrowing, irrecoverable losses, in Bolin's deft if limited debut. At "stations// in the arctic," "The only names/ are names// of ships"; "Remnants of Ice-shelves" (a title) show "weather-kites/ never reaching the ceiling of the glare," and in a bittersweet love poem called "Anniversary," "after each snowfall, it was as if something had opened the shells,/ in the limestone cliffs." Bolin sometimes presents himself as an explorer, opening up an unfamiliar place%E2%80%94in the Himalayas or in Antigua (tropical sites serve as counterpoint to all that snow). Yet his quests can turn religious, too: "in the absence of the Lord/ the apparitions cried%E2%80%94the shades in hell%E2%80%94the backlit gulls on sails." Readers who seek poems of travel, imagined and real, and poems of ecological alertness, might find a lot to like, and readers who seek the numinous may find themselves in his "practice for presenting oneself to God." Bolin deploys many kinds of free verse, from ultra-short arrangements reminiscent of Larry Eigner to careful mid-length work that follows the line of the eye ("The fence has been shaking/ since the telegraph broke; nicking your legs"), to blocky verse-paragraphs that require smaller-than-normal type. Yet he ends up consistent%E2%80%94almost too consistent%E2%80%94in his sense of what a poem can do. (Oct.)