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