Donald Everett Axinn is a practiced, dedicated, literate, accessible poet with five volumes of published verse to his credit. Change As A Curved Equation is his sixth collection and one in which his poetry deals with the phenomena of life, earth, the passage of time, the seasons, geography, geometry, and the weather. Scene: Summer sun splashes on this delusory/Seurat-sea bouncing off frothed/Fronts of cresting waves/Their tight claws pouncing on the brazen beach./Through bottoms of hairy eyebrows/Squinting eyes observe ripened shore grass/Swaying in unexplained patterns to muted music/Orchestrated by puffs of gusts pushed out/Of the east and arranged by that same/Source that sponsored this morning.//A flag unfurls held stiff by the wind./One a flagpole it pierces the horizon/Where the sky begins while a mockingbird mimics/Everyone's songs and that analyzer in my brain/Is punching out so many cards/I cannot read them all so fast.

Far too many poets spend their days in the college classroom. It's a necessity, given the small financial rewards of even the best-selling of the poets, but it does create a rather incestuous self-referentiality in poetry. Donald Everett Axinn (at least at the time of this collection) was a businessman, and it shows in his poetry. Aware of the trends of contemporary poetry, and capable of matching its subtle nuances, Axinn chooses instead to write as if poetry still mattered to those who do not spend their lives reading obscure poets. There are real emotions in these poems, told with a full bite of life in them. At times, Axinn reaches the memorable; that he does not have the lightning of a truly great poem strike him in this collection is not his fault: that happens but once or twice in any poet's life. My favorite poems in this collection are "On Father's Day," where the death of the father becomes the emotional inheritance of that day, and "Down in the Valley," a potent lyric to a beloved, who "waits amid ripened corn / her hands / outstretched / Oh I shall race down / to a slow dance / and clasp her / in the glistening gold." Some fine stuff here.

Clearly, this book is auto-biographical, judging from the author's bio on the rear flap. I chose this novel because it is about an industry that I know much about, and the factual matters were quite accurate. However, I found the brotherhood banter to be almost unreadable and incredibly un-entertaining. The author clearly enjoys writing the flying sections, as they are over-wrought with detail not found on any other topic in the book. I found no sympathy, no any emotion whatsoever for Henry (the "hero"? "goat"?) nor for anyone else in this pompous attempt at New York name-dropping....leave that for Dominick Dunne or Tom Wolfe. I was disappointed...I really wanted to like this book.

This book gives outsiders a glimpse of what goes on in the upper echelons of wheeler-dealer-dom. Fast-paced. Keeps you wanting to find out what happens next.

It all sounds too familiar to those of us in the business. The greed, the financial institutions, the short term view of things. I could not put it down! Maybe we in the business can learn something here.