When you try to condense your critical opinion of a collection of poems to a number of stars, you realize the inadequacy of ratings.

I admire much of Brian Blanchfield's ambitious and generous collection. He has a gift of the short and pungent phrase, epigrammatic without being obvious. His language has echoes of the lusciousness of Wallace Stevens and the obscure juxtaposition of John Ashberry. Blanchfield interplays the grammatical, the etymological, and the personal in interesting ways.

But when I am done, and I ask if I willread it again, I must admit that the answer is probably no. I admire the effort and often the craft. But I am left cold and oddly noncurious. Perhaps it is my failure as a reader. Perhaps the work in the end fails to "separate from the rummage." ( )

Blanchfield nearly always speaks in multiple voices. At his next word you are not sure what sentence you will be in. This keeps you thinking and concentrating on his writing. I never found my mind wandering unless I had read too much and was checking out.

Everything to Blanchfield involves colors. You can’t just walk through the colors like they are always there. They are there and he makes you see them.

The first half of this book revolves around ideas from others, ancient classical and not so ancient. He rethinks these ideas. This is his best writing because his use of ideas and language are a gift and, matched with his multiple voices, kept me engaged with his book in a way no other new writer has done.

The third quarter is from a chapbook, The History of Ideas. Given the material he has taken on it is quite a challenge. The last part of the book his multiple voices run wild. I found keeping up to be rough going.

Read this book to see how good writing and good thinking can produce outstanding poetry. ( )