Field Folly Snow

The sharp, pastoral imagery of Parks's debut is set ablaze by an ominous tone and the author's fine musical ear. Her tight tercets and prose blocks convey a sense of isolation, which, when broken by the appearance of someone other than the speaker, is as jarring as a rock heaved into a still pond: “No matter how dearly I willed my floodgates shut,” she writes, “I took on water like a buckshot dory, a hungry bucket.” Nature is alternately a close companion and a spurning lover. In the book's third section (of five), a series called “Letters of a Woman Homesteader,” brief, glistening epistles addressed to a mysterious “Mrs.” invoke a lonely speaker sometime in the past, brimming with desire, but hemmed in by manners: “Want/ leisure, physician, housekeeper, him.” Parks is a poet to watch. (Apr.)