The Iron Key: Poems

Book excerpt: Imagine a house that's furnished with anything you could needùevery person you've loved, living or dead, every story you've told, mythic or mundane. The Iron Key unlocks the door to this house. Names, dates, addresses, receipts, books, paintingsùthese elegantly composed poems are cluttered with the accumulated treasures of a lifetime. But a painful acknowledgment of loss fuels this dream of abundance, and to embrace deprivation is to feel the promise of everything still to come: the poem to be written, the friend to be mourned, the child to be loved. Throughout The Iron Key the city of Venice stands for this promise, at once fragile and magnificent, but the poems themselves take place in upstate New York or suburban New Jersey, in the dead of winter and in a country perpetually at war. Again and again, out of unpropitious circumstances, The Iron Key brings us to the oldest threshold, the door that opens onto the future. We cannot know that beauty will survive there, but the poems themselves are proof that we will continue to be overwhelmed by the beautiful. --Book Jacket.