The Mirrormaker

Poet, songwriter, and musician Laidlaw follows The Stuntman with more work that superimposes the myth of Echo and Narcissus on the Minnesota landscape through the story of Bob Dylan and Echo Helstrom. It’s a place where “homes on dead-flats/ sink into prairie sinks” and “gradations/ from landslide to landfall/ to rock-fall to rockabilly to rock-a-bye/ bifurcate the country.” The poems, which do not read like songs, attempt (and knowingly fail) to situate the self in relation to its surroundings, showing how dislocation and isolation can extend the self, though not necessarily in positive ways: “Echo thinks she walks on air/ thehypotheticalchild is born onto glass/ a vast glass shelf over a cavernous no.” The land feels hollow, literally so, for this is mining country, where “the slagpile plus the ore is the size of the hole.” Laidlaw’s deadpan humor works—“we wish we could box more of everything including ears”—though it’s a flash in the pan amid what could be viewed as an overabundance of fragments. As with Laidlaw’s first book, liner notes reference a companion album of original music. Though there is sadness and detachment in Laidlaw’s poems, he finds ways to get readers in the right frame of mind: “sun knives the trees/ then it stitches them back up.” (Oct.)