Charming Gardeners

Biespiel’s lengthy, casual set of poems addressed (by name) to various friends and colleagues takes part in several traditions at once. They are travel poems, written on airplanes and from various domestic destinations, often in Biespiel’s own Pacific Northwest; meditations on politics, from a poet known for his prose about culture and politics as well as for four previous collections; and they are successors to Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, which also addressed far-flung friends. Biespiel (The Book of Men and Women) comes off as confident, even sententious, in search of epiphany; his lines (often loose pentameters) can sound eager to share their wisdom. Biespiel says, “I know too well that a man warned is half-saved,” decides that “newlyweds… must live with death as we all must,” and promises to “stand barefoot in the dewy grass” and “Listen for a single cricket in the dark.” Yet Biespiel can excel with Northwestern landscape—“gulls like small guesses/ Over the waves, and the Columbia River/ deep and dirty with portent”— and his looks at U.S. history (“To C. D. from D. C.”) are at once informative and grand. Biespiel’s verse letters look best when read as they were written: like letters in a correspondence, as part of an effort towards unguarded friendship, attentive to a poet with much to say. (Oct.)