One Sky to the Next

Witness/participant, blasé as a boulevardier/ in the spring Paris air, Buckley couples a lyric poet's urgency with a storyteller's feral patience: claptrap until my heart started doing double-takes-/ the bus driver with my retreating hairline, the mechanic/ with my beard and a little wound of ink or motor oil/ leaking from his breast pocket. These poems will take you, reader, from the edge/ of the cliff to the tideline and outside the Arlington Theater of a remembered matinee into a rumination on coyotes and stars. From One Sky to the Next-both in, and out of, this world-one of the strongest collections I've ever read-keeps pulling me back.-Roger Weingarten