To the Bone: New and Selected Poems

This impressive collection begins with 16 new poems, followed by nine to 15 each from five previous books, 1980-1992. A master of narrative and elegy alike, Lea (The Blainville Testament) writes mostly in an everyday voice about ordinary people in common situations. The 400-line title poem, about a wood-cutting accident, limns the narrator's entire small world. Many poems have a slightly dark cast. In an elegy for a friend, he observes on a hospital tray, ""...two dark plums/ which precisely matched/ in color and conformation,/ the raccoon rounds/ of valor and of exhaustion/ through which your eyes peered."" Lea imagines a life lived backwards, from death to the womb (""The Light Going Down); in ""Horn"" he envisions his father, even while facing death, summoning his sons, as he did when they were young, home from play as usual to bed or dinner by blowing a conch shell horn, not ringing the strident porch bell. The book's epigraph is taken from the end of the final poem, which celebrates a wedding anniversary and captures a life in scenes, all ""...missing something. How could he know you/ would come, and come the day of which he sings?/ Has gone on singing. Will go on to sing."" It captures a life in scenes, all to the reader's continuing pleasure. (Oct.)