Mysterious, compelling, abounding in allusion, the poems of Karl Kirchwey demand--and deserve--our fullest attention. In The Engrafted Word he presents one conventionally ordinary scene after another: a hospital room, a zoo, the view from a bus, a child watching birds. Yet always the poet reveals an underlying potential for the miraculous. In "Sonogram," for instance, the sight of an unborn fetus elicits an eloquent apostrophe. Elsewhere Kirchwey discerns the dead soul of his mother in an elephant"s eyes, prompting this unlikely but moving elegy: I mourned again, and worshiped after her, buried in this landslide of a creature, its crushing, dreamlike step, its slack repose, its gaze, deep as the past or the hereafter... Ezra Pound argued that "it is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works." In this collection, Kirchwey surpasses Pound"s instruction, creating not only a bumper crop of indelible imagery but a meticulous record of what it means to be human. --Martha Silano