No Arcadia

"Attentive as hell, Eric Parkison's poems with their crunchy, original music of consonant and vowel, show us a vivid reality. Here, in convincing detail, is country life: the natural world and human ways of dealing with it; the wood stove with its cleanout panel; the harshly efficient cider press and its hard-won sweetness; an unforgettable hand-cranked machine for sorting the grades and sizes of potatoes. A genuine poetry-the real thing-makes this unsentimental world of work,...
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"Attentive as hell, Eric Parkison's poems with their crunchy, original music of consonant and vowel, show us a vivid reality. Here, in convincing detail, is country life: the natural world and human ways of dealing with it; the wood stove with its cleanout panel; the harshly efficient cider press and its hard-won sweetness; an unforgettable hand-cranked machine for sorting the grades and sizes of potatoes. A genuine poetry-the real thing-makes this unsentimental world of work, ruination and survival into a leaping-goat celebration of clarity."-Robert PinskyACT I: Here we meet characters, enter the katabasis and end with "Garbage Man," who is nearing a sort of self-realization. ACT II: A deepening of despair, anxiety, solitudinous feeling. Speakers are under duress, dissatisfied, or hard to parse as presences. The culmination is found in the three sections of "I've Been at This Corner." This is a last accounting of the will to leave: "Everything seems west from here."ACT III: Resolution through separation. The speakers here fail in love, flee the devil, remember the lost, and finally end with the recognition that they must seize the moment in "Recusatio."