Time's Arc

F. D. Reeve's new collection, The Puzzle Master and Other Poems, is divided into "The Puzzle Master," whose fifty pages form the body of the book, and "Other Poems," a set of eight relatively short pieces. First, "Other Poems."

In New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, there stands a relatively small Greek funerary stele from the sixth century. The shaft is of a young girl carved in profile, holding a pair of doves to her breast. The gentle gravity the ancient sculptor gave the child's face and stance is expressed through the sweet farewell she gives to her pet doves. Reeve opens The Puzzle Master and Other Poems with a telling of this scene, one that is both sad and gentle. In the simply titled "A Girl and Two Doves," he writes, in beautifully evocative verse, of the girl who once stood "like a cameo pinned to the land, / who endured... / ... / the Olympians' defection." Yet after all this time, she still

bears life in her breast...........................preserving earth's shelllike the crust of a breadfor us as we comeand our immortal dead.

Reeve's diction is plain, his poetry is accessible; it allows the old stevedore from the New York docks to throw a sharp satirical elbow into the side of what might be called "professional" poetry in one poem called "The Pushcart Prize."

The Puzzle Master and Other Poems relishes the ekphrastic. In doing so, Reeve evokes John Keats and W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams and James Joyce, while at the same time sharing his own unique pages. And if there is a thread, though not the only one, that connects so many of these poems, it is that of time—time and timelessness. In this volume Reeve gives us a conversation with tradition, but not only that. There is at the same time a very conscious discussion of age, of recession, of death. Yet there is nothing mournful or morbid about The Puzzle Master and Other Poems, simply a pensive probing of the arc of time, which, though it encompasses death, also preserves the art and poetry of previous eras so that they seem to live on. It is a celebration of the artists' mimetic powers, then and now, and ultimately an embracing of life. Reeve chooses his discussions with the art of ancient Greece, as above, with the art of fifteenth-century Florence and the great Ghiberti doors. "These little men and women in shining bronze," Reeve writes, "carry on their lives as if there were no end."

Reeve balances weighty subjects with an ability to poke fun at himself, as in "In the Men's Room at the Café Provence" (a very nice restaurant in Brandon, Vermont), where Reeve contemplates three 50s-era Citroën cars on display above the toilet: "Are days discrete? Do minutes / make illusions like the lines / Van Gogh wrapped his cypress in?" These cars, once aspired to by those who rejected the VW Bug or the Renault Dauphine, are here reclaimed by memories of a long ago Paris and thus saved from the decay of time.

Reeve is a poet who has always been engaged in the foremost issues of his time, as was exemplified by his companionship to Robert Frost on their joint visit to Russia and their attempted discussions with Nikita Krushchev at the height of the Cold War. That engagement seems still to be fresh as in "For the Four Thousand," a lament for the American dead, victims of the war in Iraq. The poem references a dying Christ as well as a dying planet. It is a theme he renews in the following poem, where only children, bright eyed, fashioning snow angels in a snowy Vermont lawn can in any way compensate for a planet, "diminished by life like a star worn down by stardom."

Reeve does not allow us to lament for long; the rejoinder to human limitations is to dig deeper into the possibilities of an immediate experience, one that engenders for...