Since at least the days of Horace, poets have found in nature, in the local flora and fauna, an invitation to observe, name, meditate and wonder. In QUARRY, Carolyn Guinzio’s second collection, this tradition continues, in poems of tautly drawn, subtle eloquence. Her tone is somber, her pace gradual, as if, at any moment, something might happen to alter everything and toss the great endurance of life into ruin, or revelation: “A tremendous question hangs in the December sky.” —Ann Lauterbach Good painters often talk of nameless colors. Brice Marden once told me he spent a month just mixing. The poems in QUARRY are full of strange, ?nameless mixtures of words. The work is descriptive, but it wants “not to know.” The poems seem from one region, but the prose poems and the stanzaic ones have such opposed opaque architectures. One voice, but a voice decisive and skeptical. Nothing pastel, but full of dramatic holes punched out. This is a difficult idiolect, and it is a lesson in not...