Family Portrait with Scythe: Poems, Paperback/James Owens

James Owens' stunning valediction, both for and forbidding mourning, slices with steely memory to the "wet bone." Stumbling with a boy's "ignorant gravity," Owens cannot right the "unbalanced accounts" of his miner father's sooty lungs, his parents' exhausted marriage--nor his own professed failings. Yet his keen eye in and of the natural world does lead to the scales balanced, if precariously--in belonging "on the brief earth," in parsing spring from grief, in "the good story of the body" whose light becomes "the shine of spirit." A master poet works this crescent blade, a master who embraces life's whole catastrophe as equally as he farewells it past. --Linda Parsons