NO ARCADIA

"Attentive as hell, Eric Parkison's poems with their crunchy, original music of consonant and vowel, show us a vivid reality. Here, in convincing detail, is country life: the natural world and human ways of dealing with it: the wood stove with its cleanout panel; the harshly efficient cider press and its hard-won sweetness; an unforgettable hand-cranked machine for sorting the grades and sizes of potatoes. A genuine poetry-the real thing-makes this unsentimental world of work, ruination and survival into a leaping-goat celebration of clarity." -Robert Pinsky"Eric Parkison's No Arcadia takes conscious aim at the world of pastoralism and harmony with nature, offering instead a vision of a "shorn landscape" that is true to post-industrial America, a landscape populated by poisonous hogweed, polluted creeks and junked cars. This chapbook acknowledges the ugliness of such a world: "there's no way to master such a broken thing," one poem says, while another realizes, "The people before us / Knew not to want more than you can have," and a third concludes, "Our luck is a dear thing.""And yet, like the apple sugar tasted by an ex-Marine during cider-making, there is much sweetness, too, in these keenly observed poems. One of them is entitled "Asymptote," after a figure in analytic geometry: and here, indeed, the curve of feeling approaches but never quite touches the straight line of reality. This not-quite-touching is the saving grace of a collection in which feeling and reality are held in an infinite relationship. "You try now to love those things," Parkison says, "that waste can only slowly undo."-Karl Kirchwey