Crucible

Crucible is a collection of poems by award-winning poet Daniel Bosch. The poems break easily into two sections. In the first, a set of ironic, emulative "Homages & Elegies," Bosch playfully apostrophizes poets living and dead, as if it took two not only to tango, but to write a poem. He wrestles with Dickinson, grooves with the glacial wit of Frost (belatedly), waltzes with Walcott's ghost (prematurely), mimics Mandelstam, picks apples with Sappho, and shares a transcontinental flight with Brodsky. Each poem is carefully measured; some are composed by meticulous inversion of their precursor's poetic strategy. Literary but by no means prudish, these poems look back-and forward-to a time when poems took stands readers could understand, disagree with, and laugh at. The result is a sort of hypertext essay on what it means to pour oneself into the mold of "poet" in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The second half of Crucible is "Passion Fruit," a fourteen-poem "sonnet" that courts a single muse through incarnations as various as "Orange," "Peach," "Banana," "Cherries," "Blueberries," and "Mango." Part love poem, part meditation on physical longing and memory, "Passion Fruit" celebrates the eye's brief glimpses of beauty in poems frank, funny, and joyful. "I admire Daniel Bosch's Crucible very much for its inventiveness and vitality and the enviable skill of its execution. Every poem feels alive, and though they're often 'homages' to other writers, and 'after' other writers, the book is crackling throughout with an individual personality." -David Ferry