"Someone else's name" by Joseph Harrison (Zoo Press, 2003)

Poems from Antioch Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, etc., with an introduction by Hecht. Its three sections have promising titles - "Songs and Sonnets", "Stories", "Signs and Figures". Reading the introduction makes me realise that I'm likely to miss many allusions - to Frost, Shakespeare, etc. All the same I don't think I've missed much in "Sunshine and Rain", which lists contrasting pairs (e.g. Lear's wisdom and folly) ending with the more puzzling line "As words from long ago fill up this line". "Air Larry" is gently humourous I suppose.

The following has more to it -

And now the world's a blank page, frozen hard    As disbelief, extreme As absence, blanketing the small back yard    In flash and fitful gleam, Concealing the cold earth we worked and scarred    Till harvest comes to seem A distant pageant in which we humans starred    Only in some dim dream (p.15)

"Dante Lost" is fun. I found "View of Baltimore from Green Mount Cemetery" (7 pages) tedious. "Peregrine Falcon on Skyscraper" is 3 pages of short lines (axxa rhyming stanzas: e.g. "All all the time/ A feathered acrobat/ Who's utterly at ease/ With the sublime")- a pleasant, informative read.

Here are some of the more prosaic lines from the sonnet sequence, "As if"

I'd love you, lady, at a lower rate If that would help. I'd take it to extremes. Send flowers daily, then send chocolate, And book us flights to Paris, where we'd go Sauntering down the boulevards, and sip Expensive wines ... ... One scene with you is all I'd ask to play: I'd ham it up, I'd play it to the hilt And make it run forever and a day. ... My credits don't amount to a hill of beans. My canon is a stack of might-have-beens, Assembled, with long labour, bit by bit. A tree fell, but nobody noticed it. Attack a windmill and the windmill wins ... Know you are always in mind and heart Where we are both together and apart. When sunrise sweeps the sky from gray to blue Or, shedding clouds, the moon steps into view

Now for some random extracts -

• In every story we read our own stories, As if the times gave us, in daily pages, Untimely legends we're the fractals of (p.29)

• He loved fly-fishing, and wrote poetry, Shy serious pursuits, where patience leads To lucky spots of brief felicity. The trick's to make the lure look natural, ... Then as an image rises to take the bait Jerk the taut line (p.33)

• The sign/thing sine curve thing, like thing and sign Were thing and wave at once, a cursive sign Written on water by wind with fire from earth In the richest contradictions of connotation, Doing a triple back flip telling a joke On up through inside under over and out. (p.82)