Booklife Review

The dedication to “Boy at the Plate,” one of the first poems in Vermont poet Culver’s striking debut full-length collection, reads “for my children, and for my parents.” The sweep of that exemplifies Culver’s approach, which looks back and forward at once and engages with moments and rites of passage that endure from one generation to the next, always pinning down, with rare precision of language, fresh insight and feeling, even in a subject as familiar as a boy standing— legs as “unsteady / as tent poles in a squall”—in the batter’s box: “For now, / the boy must believe he stands / in the mouth of the first fear /birthed in the world.”

A Passable Man offers inviting verses about nature (“A hawk hangs perfectly still, / then sheers toward the river”) and fishing—hours spent in this meditative activity with his father inspire the poet’s acknowledgement “And yet today I have this patience / for things that drive some people crazy.” But Culver’s ripe, rousing considerations of life quite naturally encompass the carnal (“my heart she eats / bright cables of blood unspool”), the painful (a series of elegies in the final section, including for his parents), and the complex space between where so much life is lived, as in the gently comic quintilla “The Song of the Open Marriage.”

Culver offers a host of reveries drawn from memory but avoids the sentimental, even when linking winter’s temporary wiping away of life (“The roses have used up their time on Earth”) to uncertainty in the heart of a woman the narrator loves: “What to feel? she wonders, that space / in her chest noncommittal.” With clarity and power, Culver identifies, interrogates, and fully stirs in his readers the complex feelings both children and parents all eventually encounter, always in resonant, accessible, unpredictable verse that emphasizes meticulous observation.

Takeaway: Striking poems that observe life as it's lived, in precise language that stirs rich feeling.

Great for fans of: Mark Doty, Sydney Lea.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A