The Vineyard

The watchful and intelligent fourth volume (after Left-Handed) from Galassi, chairman emeritus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, comprises a long-form poem set in a quasi-fictional Long Island village. The tone is by turns appreciative and elegiac as the poet ruminates on place and the changing seasons, lending memorializing and pastoral notes to spare meditations: “(everything gets its two weeks, just like us,/ plus two of anticipation/ and one of grieving): and, yes, forsythia/ apple, wisteria, and bridal wreath,/ iris, peony—the season’s slow parade.” Elsewhere, neighbors now dead are mourned, as is the place itself: “This will all be gone, if not in my own time,/ in yours, or in another hundred years./ But don’t say that it won’t be mourned.” Amidst this awareness of the potential for loss, Galassi notes, “The fact what seems eternal’s/ not eternal makes it/ all the more lovely.” “I’m just another duffer/nattering on about humiliation,” he writes at one point, distilling the work’s winningly self-aware and companionably conversational attitude. This pulses with feeling beneath its placid surface. (Mar.)