Making the New Lamb Take

The refreshing humility of this prize-winning debut collection derives from the fact that the poems, which are well-crafted and full of small pleasures, often look outward first. They consider the details of the world and its stories—a small-town traveling fair, a doll house, Cain and Abel, a robin, a circumcision or Pandora's box—and encourage a reader to put together the larger meanings. This is not to say that Fried's unassuming approach does not astonish: in a poem that begins with simple description ("In the lot by the volunteer fire house"), Fried manages a leap to a grander claim: "These are moments of slack, of wander,/ of full reversion to the old calm." He is able to find "the jag and shimmer" of the most ordinary-seeming places and things. The moon was "once flawless and ample/ as a cufflink"; a kicking fetus "is building something/ in there" with "little saw strokes/ and two-handed hammer taps." He even finds a new angle on Orpheus and Eurydice. Some poems are very quiet, but they find their solidity with insistent rhythms and subtle rhymes, with intelligent syntax, with "their soft mouths poised/ to part with their first consonantal sounds." (May)