Though the 50 poems of Montana-based farrier and poet Craig (Can You Relax in My House
) center around landscape and farm work, they consistently confound and disrupt expectations of pastoral poetry, veering wildly from romanticized notions of farm life toward threatening, obsessive, and even bizarrely surreal narratives. There are gay donkeys, a fierce boxing match between hawk and rabbit and constant judgments from opinionated horses. Craig's speaker is conscious of the artifice of the poems, offering trickery and confusion, and sometimes indifference. In one poem, a man holding a shotgun over the speaker complains, "You poets are always sad./That's about all you can do is be sad." At times, Craig rejects his audience completely: "I will pull the blinds/on you, reader. Good bye." Each poem is stacked with absurd reverie, cinematic observations and hilarious, winking descriptions, à la James Tate. They are also willfully uninterested in profounder implications: "people eating/ popcorn resemble/ praying mantises/period." At the book's heart, however, is a moving admission of the true power reading literature can invoke: "It's like I'm standing in a crowded/ public place, having my clothes/ removed briskly by a single flick/ of a powerful finger,/ over and over again." (Feb.)
