The Law of Falling Bodies

The hard centre of The Law of Falling Bodies bears down on the twin enmities of pain and loss. But the book ranges over a broad field, with poems covering everything from the inundations of summer rain (""It's like living in the spit valve of a big trombone"") to a lovesick drunk listening to Patsy Cline (""My drink's on the rocks, and I am, too."") Glaser begins with the quirks and revelations of nature, shifts to those difficult adjustments we make as the body breaks down, modulates to a series of scenes imbued with music, and ends on an elegiac note in memory of his late wife (""Grief follows me like a dog behind the butcher's truck""). Along the way, the poems touch on a restless scale of tones, as light as the indignant comedy of ""It Ain't the Heat, It's the Stupidity"" and as heartbreakingly dark as ""Autopsy."" At the core is the constant interplay of an agile mind and rich language--what Ezra Pound called ""the dance of the intellect among words""--always feeling out what it is to be human.