The Apparitioners

Set among suburban homes and in neighboring forests and fields, Witte's descriptive verse, seasonal lyric and short narrative poems arrive in sonnets, in all manner of rhyming stanzas and in meticulous free verse. This debut collection describes the "Frail correspondences/ Required of mass and air/ To lift the hawk" into flight; treats the fears of parents in "cul-de-sacs"; considers October sparrows in "fall's/ false spring"; and compares the speaker and his friends to fireflies, who "pass in time from form to form,/ containers for a glow not ours." Witte's interest in casual American speech, and some of his Northeastern landscapes, suggest Robert Frost, while the austerity of his diction, and his more than passing interest in mortality, imply lessons learned from Anthony Hecht. His search for human lesson in gardens and fields, and his attraction to green retreats, even suggests Frost's sometime model Horace, who propounded worldly wisdom from his Sabine farm. Witte, who is editor-in-chief of St. Martin's Press, concludes with a dramatic monologue, written in the voice of a woman recovering (slowly) from a stroke; it wings slowly from urgent pathos to a kind of bitter resignation, and works to balance the more contented voices that carry the shorter poems. The calm fortitude the latter display suggest work of long planning and considered judgment: Horace himself might approve. (Nov.)