The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse 2003%E2%80%932008

Ball's superb new volume is strange, haunting, and wise, but hard to characterize: it's an omnibus of new short works and a compendious introduction to an imaginary preindustrial land, with its own folkways, myths, and codes of honor, in two great novellas, one wise long poem, many worse short ones, and a brace of thoughtful, harsh flash fiction. One novella ("Pieter Emily") offers a graceful, sharp update on Irish stories of faerie temptation; the other, "The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp and Carr," is a fable of youthful honor and cosmic injustice. Both stories ask how the real world can ever compete with the invented codes of art. The two novellas' shared motifs%E2%80%94duelists, false dreams, fruitless missions, confusion between natural and human law%E2%80%94recur in the final long poem, "The Skin Feat," whose titular accomplishment becomes a disappearing act: "Your mother sews you into a blanket./ Your father adjusts his hat./ The town gathers to see you off." Such mysteriously useless missions, frustrating symbols and unsolved mysteries enter prose sketches at the front of the book, where "That lamp which stands between ourselves and a brighter lamp often seems less like a lamp and more like a hooded man." (July)