The prolific Beachy-Quick (Spell
, 2004) returns to the familiar lyric territory of his arresting debut in this challenging third book: the intensifying, fragmenting and distorting powers of language as it relates self to world. In 18 untitled and highly personal poems sharing imagery and themes, plus a short prose introduction stating the book was written during "a year…in which those whom I loved died," he tracks "[t]his world that through desire is seen," and manages to relate the caterpillar spinning and emerging from its cocoon to struggles in early American settlements, the minute expressions of love and the often invisible ebbing of loss. Onomatopoeic words ("calm the sentence the lake/ will calm/…/ breath gathers itself in a comma/ a comma informs the wave") and etymological explorations ("eagle at the root... borrowed from Old English egle
... probably from aqua
// water at the root of the bird") form a vivid associative chain. (May)
