Betting on the Night

Held's poems are so full of keenly heard sounds, sharply observed sights, sly and sympathetic humour, and enjoyed experience that it is easy to fall in love with them. Maybe that explains the bare-breasted beauty languidly, tantalizingly dozing (in a chapel? an art museum?) on the cover. At any rate, the poems are actually about fishing, relaxing with the Packers on TV or a bottle of bourbon, remembering burning the trash outdoors, skipping church of a Sunday, and imagining the glaciers creating the Midwest.

They include celebrations of weeds, the poet's scrotum, and childish abandon; a fantasia about some cats who haunt a grain elevator; a perfectly envisioned moment of self-pity ("Before Fire"); a serious parody that turns the justified bitterness in a Richard Hugo poem into philosophical amusement; a tribute to Fred Flintstone; and a couple glimpses of Van Gogh riding the rails and stalking the landscape of Montana. Set in Wisconsin and Montana, they are poems of the Northwest, gusts of sweet, cold, enlivening air.