No Vacancies in Hell: Poems

These arresting and memorable poems are filled with love and history. Not general love and history, for the author is a poet of the particular and he writes of quite individual loves and of episodes of quite local history. Several long poems of absorbing skill stand out in the book: "Requiem for Christine Latrobe," "Letter Concerning the Yellow Fever," and "The Assassins," an imagined address after the deed from John Wilkes Booth to one of his co-conspirators. A deep sense of place, namely of Baltimore, Tidewater Country, and Appalachian Maryland, informs the pages of this book. Yet through the art of his poetry, Epstein makes what begins as local history and personal feeling end as part of the reader's own country. It is finally the geography of the human mind and heart that is the design of this impressive work.