A Passable Man

Ralph Culver's is a poetry of great precision, almost delicacy, and of subtle power, deployed in poems that dwell in the ordinary and bring with them a sense of the extraordinary...; what lives between his lines is the shadow that haunts us all. In A Passable Man, he interrogates a life in five parts: "I could not keep from turning / to check, mid-step, / the footprints strung behind / in the climbing snow" (from "Prelude"). This is a life shadowed by loss and regret, moved by "the common f...