The Red Bird

With the persistent, dappled vision of an ecstatic pragmatist, Joyelle McSweeney sees things as they are through "the modern knothole": "Up on the hill,/ a white tent had just got unsteadily to its feet/ like a foal or a just-foaled cathedral." Eventuality, as it is delicately shaded by the fine and fearless intelligence of these kinesthetic arrangements, coincides with imaginative possibility; the resulting poems are as much mind as place; much galaxy as time-inevitable and correct as only true whimsy can be.

"Outside, the web of tenthousandthings;/ inside here, only three: filmstrip of a helicopter's shadow;/ against an Antarctic wall; silkscreen/ of the grand central ceiling. The idealized landscape-/ I want a room in it."