F.D. Reeve is one of the finest, most underappreciated poets now at work in this country. For thirty-some-odd years he has been producing work of stunning power and relevance, work that reminds one all at once of the prophetic voice of Yeats, the piercing, crystalline sensibilities of Stevens, and the wild winds and fur pelts of a Siberian shaman. Unfortunately, the cultural spirit of the times, in its myopia, hasn't been able to keep up with him. It's true that Reeve has sometimes had a weakness for doggerelesque flourishes, but why so many critics focus on those while ignoring the overwhelming power of the rest of the work is a mystery.

Although "The Urban Stampede" of the title is an oratorio written for performance and perhaps doesn't stand up as well on the page, the short poems included in this collection are, as the previous reviewer stated, monumentally good. Simply quoting lines from these poems will not do them justice, will not show how they cohere, but some of the lines are simply astounding. From "The Side Show Uprising": "Praying for what they had nothing of/the homeless died one by one on the cold stones/unable to bear the grotesques of love" From "Still Life": "Real are the apples of Sodom, which when you touch them/dissolve in smoke and ashes on the table" From "Highgate Easter": "Old Believers gone, the words lie on the stones:/ No life is true but dying makes it fair" From "Bones in a Landscape": "the zodiac came alive;/a holy man at the door/arrested the unfaithful stars" From "Looking Ahead": "Neither was nor will be, the Great Attractor,/black moon, pangalactic draw,/something from nothing, the secret dies./Nowhere to go--we breed where we are--consumed in natural law."

I could cite many more, but best just to get this book and read the poems, as well as Reeve's previous work. Long after today's Poets of the Hour have been forgotten, there will be many of us still reading his poetry, for its beauty, its timelessness and prophetic daring, its metaphysical grandeur, and its raw, hungry energy.

THE URBAN STAMPEDE is spectacular. Reeve's contribution to American poetry, as I now see it, is to have made possible highly sensuous, fully embodied, musical thought--in a way, an improvement upon the (at times) mere rhetoric and abstraction of Stevens. Halfway between free and formal verse, the poems lean backwards in their echoes of poetry past all the while establishing new possibilities of complex expression--all the while negotiating a darkness that the mind (and a full life) can't exactly compensate for. I think "Barnyard" an immensely successful poem, the first stanza stunning in its metaphorical equivalences and formal balance. "Highgate Easter" seems to gather up and comment on any number of poems that want to see in nature some sign of redemption, trumping these poems with the line "Men in winter let their language go" (a subtle reworking, as I take it, of the argument in Stevens' "The Snow Man"). The last line of "Wild Life," in its evocation of nature's exasperating indifference, is MONUMENTALLY good: "and wild dogs shred the terrified sun." I can't think of a better line of poetry; it compresses an entire philosophical argument. What an image! The music of "Watersong" is impressive, beautiful. I like the way it recasts, in softer tones, the problem in previous poems. "Bones in a Landscape" is also very fine, the last line, again, particularly stunning: "a holy man at the door/ arrested the unfaithful stars." "Conventional" navigates similar poetic waters in a way that juxtaposes incommensurate perspectives--I LOVE "the infinite universe balloons/ in the cage of its own unused space." The tiny/immense paradox of contained expansion subtly becomes a metaphor for the mind's ambition. HOW CAN POETRY BE THIS GOOD??????? "The Grand Illusion" seems to walk new ground, at least with respect to its slightly more conversational voice and its presentation of a series of unanswered, unaswerable questions--questions that link religious "cathedral" and secular "casual eating place" in a tempting musical, miraculous hypothetical. "Open and Closed" reminds me of a poem Reeve wrote (a villanelle?) about a museum in Russia that was similarly "closed." In a SELECTED POEMS, these two would work very well together. The rhyme scheme itself seems to embody the poem's mischievous send up; the last line hits you like a ton of dirt on a coffin lid! Suddenly, you're on a ride to the afterlife and cannot get to the necessary station. (In an anthology, I'd juxtapose this poem with the old Em Dickinson standard: "Because I Could Not Stop For Death.") "The Instruction" is absolutely devastating (I wonder if he's sent it to Robert Pinsky?); it nicely offers a more genuine democracy of the spirit, one fleshed out in "The Urban Stampede." "Afterword" is a lovely ars poetica. I recommend to any true poetry lover this gorgeously sad but triumphant book. It's about time that some publisher issue a selected poems from this secret giant of American letters.

The Moon And Other Failures is a hauntingly beautiful collection of poems fully documenting the impressive artistic talent and astonishing literary range of F.D. Reeve. Lake Champlain: The rocks rise from the water: the wind, from the West./Old fables constellate the sky./The woods are full of spiders. Abenaki ghosts/in bark canoes glide among the pines./On the granite cliff we sleep in each other's arms/under the cast of a mythic spell/by long, sweet summer love made soft and brown,/waiting for the great lake god himself/to deliver the past into our native hands./We dream we are the islands and water/that sing through the trees of the happy hunting grounds/where the starry animals are slaughtered/and trapped souls shaking in the morning light/as in a web spiral off to death./Awake, we step across our long-lost lives/stone by stone, breath by breath.