Goat Funeral: Poems

"When Virginia Woolf went to Greece in 1906, she felt that 'all lumps in the earth here are but so much dust heaped negligently over some well-ordered temple or statue beneath.' Identical treasure is inherent in the heroic soil for Christopher Bakken; this poet is nurtured by lithic yield: 'Here I believe in stone, existence in the flesh . . .' And with all the power of a burial that is yet a parturition, his book reads as a kind of tephromancy, a divination by ashes: 'Since the earth is god I am not dust but god.' It is not 'questions of travel,' or even the effects of an affinity these luminous poems afford, but a lasting procession. There is no 'after Greece,' nothing subsequent: the dust and what is beneath it are present forever in the poet's mouth." --Richard Howard