This second volume shows that Slate's Bakeless Prize–winning debut, The Invention of the Maggot
(2005), wasn't just hype: Slate, who spent more than two decades in the corporate world before beginning his poetic career, is a poet for whom long, wide experience really seems to have turned into wisdom, whose deft handling of syntactic changes and verbal ironies supports considered verdicts on the things and people of this world. Poems reflect intercontinental travel and corporate responsibilities (now ended); dealings with elderly parents and with grown children; and welcome, if melancholy, time alone. They also give compact, sometimes grim, and vivid advice: “Don't call out to the world,/ since it can't answer in one voice.†Another poem summarizes firefighters' training: “Far out on an island in the harbor,/ recruits rehearsed in burning rooms.†Slate seeks and often finds a classical simplicity, not to be confused with simplification: his deliberate pace, his mergers of disillusion with an almost (but not quite) religious poise and his interpolated travelogues might put careful readers in mind of Robert Hass. “How far I am from what I'd cure with words,†Slate says late in the volume—and yet, for all his regrets and self-chastisements, there are spiritual ailments for which such careful lines may indeed be the cure. (Apr.)
