Keith Waldrop
Haunt
ISBN: 0-9679854-0-4
12 dollars

The border between the abstract and the concrete is sharply drawn in these poems, if only to be continuously bridged, or to dwell on the ramifications of their contact: "An aging house, well yes he/ understands that but suddenly/ down it falls.". Waldrop is able to move the work through propositions that would undermine a less mature use of tonal slippages, unreliable narration and contradictions of the "there is no everything" sort. One gets the sense, in poems like "Indication," of stepping into ongoing processes for taking hold of ideas, dreams and even reality: "idea by idea/ my body regains its/ argument." How the details of feeling mingle with our conceptions of the world provide Waldrop with a window on a life "new every morning" and make for a writing that is a kind of cenotaph to itself, able only to haunt existence rather than to fully take it up.

--Publishers Weekly