Hurry Back

Here are Alvin Greenberg's poems of experience, his grown man's tribute to negative capability. He knows we live in a world of indeterminacy, with our various ignorances and failures of language. Yet without prettying-up these conditions, his Hurry Back offers an unsentimental, clear-eyed paean to them, a kind of "elegiac lean-to / set right out in the weather because the weather's / what there is and where we do our loving". Though such sagacity pervades this book, these are not poems of resignation. Greenberg knows the birds on the highway "almost always fly up in time," but he's not going to let that "almost" stop him from driving a little over the speed limit.