LANDSCAPES OLD AND NEW

Ireland presents a poetry book that celebrates the outdoors and offers ruminative reflections on life.

The poet opens with “In the Woods,” about a forest walk with “summer overhead” and “autumn underfoot,” in which the speaker considers how they are “Just kicking death around / While I am lost in life.” He waxes poetic about Appalachia in “Dead in the Water”: “With its hills like swells, / And its breezes like the sound / Heard on shores and shells.” Ireland observantly documents in “Two Trees” how a “fragile white-haired lady” stares at her discarded Christmas tree from indoors, “Her window like a mirror in between.” The speaker in “Dark Place” tries to cure their “dark propensity to go / From high to low” by venturing outside, while in “Private Road,”the speaker laments how housing development changes the landscape, noting, “we used to have the mountain to ourselves”; two pages later, in “Mountain Development,” the speaker mourns that “Soon signs will forbid / And a gate will block / The pleasure of / Our evening walk.” A few works take darker turns, such as “Creek Rock” and “Roadside Example,” which comment on horrific antigay violence. However, Ireland’s affinity for the outdoors is most evident in this collection; his descriptions are visceral and evocative, as when noting “dead leaves, // Deep as a shag rug” (“In the Woods”) or the “firefly-dotted dark” (“Private Road”). His rhyme schemes and use of perspective are playful in lines such as “Five deer were gathered for a private meeting / This evening at the bottom of the lawn. / I opened the back door and yelled a greeting: / The buck let out a snort, and all were gone” (“Private Meeting”). However, a handful of political poems feel ill-fitting, such as “Sunday-Morning Quarterback,” which recalls CBS News Sunday Morning’s stories on the Vietnam War in the 1980s, evoking “the President—the fat-faced Godfather— / Embattled but safe at home, defending the whole endeavor.”

A collection that delivers a pleasant and appreciative, if slightly uneven, poetic take on nature themes.