Kenneth Pobo (now professor of English at Widener University) was in graduate school when he released this, his first book of poems. It has the energy of a committed young adult mind awash in the throes of poetic ecstasy. Although he has published several other chapbooks since then, and written a great deal of work in hundreds of little magazines, his earliest collection still packs quite a punch. One sonnet, "The Scuttlers," typifies the sharpness of his language: "Hello. I'm a suburban insect / burrowing into homes, chewing cash," go the first lines. It turns out the "suburban insect" is simply a commuter on a train, but Pobo transforms the figure into a Kafkaesque creation. Another poem is a sustained line-by-line parody of T. S. Eliot called "The Disco Version of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock": "I have measured out my life with AM tunes," he writes. This books bristles with so much life that it's a shame it's out of print. Some small press entrepreneur ought to collect the fiercest material in this and his later books (as well as his extensive catalogue of poems in little magazines and original anthologies) for a "greatest hits" selected poems. The "AM tunes" that inspired this fine writer's work would find a welcoming audience in the intimate but committed community of poetry lovers.

This is a superb chapbook. Even at 24 pages total, it is integrated in theme and image, full of well-chosen and ordered poems. Some poems recall childhood memories of suburban Illinois (Villa Park, a town near Chicago): the old Ovaltine factory, a DuPage county quarry, a local church. Others are more timeless, set in a nursing home or a backyard garden. A sense of disappointment, especially from memories of the "familiar, an echo / we keep riding past," is balanced by the truth and beauty (thank you Keats) of nature, as well as the preservation of what is good about life. These clipped, image-driven poems seem indebted both to haiku minimalism and to the non sequitur style of Stevens. Perception of the beautiful (hence the book's title, as if the author is searching for something to redeem life and finally locates it in a flower) becomes a remedy for things we lose or let go, like a baptism remembered in apostasy. My favorite poem here, "November Chrysanthemums," is also a love poem: "For you, there has never been a bud / not worth waiting for." In "Mulching the Roses, we are told "that even repetitive / things can be exquisite." As is this book.