Many poems in this first collection by a poet who has found keen readers in a wide range of literary journals, anthologies, chapbooks, etc. have the tight-knit structure and emotional impact of the best short fictions; their elegaic rhythms and figurative daring lift them to poetry's highest levels. Brooke Horvath imbues even the most mundane scenes and objects - backyards, movie theaters, family snapshots, a lifted spoon, and a garden's zinnias, bush-beans, weeds - with mythic dimensions, the classic pathos of the spirit's endurance in our tragic world. His poetic gifts are amply supported by the scholarship and critical sense that place him in the tradition of E. A. Robinson, Allen Tate, Anthony Hecht, and Richard Howard.