In one poem, a boy's tormented, guilty dreams keep him "revolving painfully on the spit of sleep." In another, an ailing mother, "the ruin of her mind... infinite," recites poetry she learned as a schoolgirl for a son she does not recognize. A small child loses her beloved brother to death. With varying degrees of reluctance, youths undergo rites of passage that include hunting, football practice, J-stripping, and ice-skating. ("Life will be like this," one observes). Other poems draw on stories from Hebrew, Greek, and Hindu creation myths. And familiar lines from well-known poets are woven together in a humorous poem that satirizes dust jacket blurbs ("An unbarbaric yawp."-- Walt Whitman).
Carper also offers thoughts on people who "do" things for a living that are slightly (or greatly) out of the ordinary: from an ominous "Dump Man" with a penchant for neatness to a kazoo maker written up in the New York Times, from a former concentration-camp guard who protests his innocence to a poet who, jogging, reflects on "the way life is an uphill-downhill matter/ And how it can be told of in iambics."
Birth and death, the joy and woe of marriage, coming of age and remaining forever a child-- these and other timeless topics are given new voice in these memorable poems linked by Thomas Carper'sunshakable "faith that we have something yet to share/ Though all the universe's atoms move/ Toward regions desolate of human love."
