Fleet River

A sequel of sorts to his first book of poetry, James Longenbach's new collection is about wonder: falling in love with the world, as though for the first time. With crisp phrasing and tightly controlled abstraction, Fleet River traces the journey of two children, two lovers, and two travelers through landscapes earthly and otherworldly, following the river as it turns, dips underground, then reemerges unexpectedly as they experience awe at the workings of the universe. Mimicking the river's shifting course, the poems revise themselves as the book moves forward, turning against their own best conclusions, proving that the pilgrims' journey is less the discovery of love than the re-creation, poem by poem, of love's possibilities.

Publishers Weekly

With emblematic landscapes (Italian and rural American) and a consistent voice, Longenbach (Threshold) presents his second collection as a loose book-length sequence, describing his speaker's progress through an adulthood marked by an enduringly affectionate marriage, two young daughters, and a nevertheless persistent sense of regret. "We live our lives/ Over again if we live long enough," he writes in "Anniversary," and the poems that lead up to that conclusion meditate on the always-mixed emotions that mark the course of a life. "Who gets to change?/ Who gets the life/ Imagined when we're young?" The greater range of Longenbach's first collection has been traded for greater self-assurance in these insistently personal retrospectives, which suggest debts to Louise Gl ck and to Carl Phillips (who together have replaced Frost and Stevens as this poet's models). While some openings find nice metaphors ("Because I did not want/ To be heard// I made a harpsichord"), Longenbach's real attractions now lie in the terse words he finds for a deep inner life, revealing why "the others... nestled beside us, unhurried/ As persimmons," or explaining why "the accumulation of detail/ Felt like loss." (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

James Longenbach is the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. He is the author of four distinguished critical studies of twentieth-century poetry, most recently Modern Poetry after Modernism. His first book of poems, Threshold, was published by the University of Chicago Press.