Disappointment Island

In several long sequences of precise lyrics, small songs and "narrowed prayers," Reid casts a paleontologist's eye on the accumulations of everyday life, the remains of the near and distant past. Objects, those accretions of memory, are taken down from the shelving and dusted off by a mind hungry for meaning and transcendence. This is a poetry that asks the big questions: What survives, and what may be revealed by listening to the "erotic murmur of material things?" In so many of these moving poems, time is telescoped and small human figures are set against a stark backdrop of barrens, desert places, stones and "an excess of bones." There are meditations on the arrogance of seeking such emptiness, and also on the various places and provisional dwellings we come to call home: a cabin fastened into place "by sticking the chimney into the mist," a crumbling Cuban love hotel and "the faintly luminous tents that have gathered like so many eyes / around the fire in the desert..." Here be wonders.