Drinking the River

There is elemental life in David Polk’s poems, intimate moments when it seems our remove from the natural world—fatal to it—can be bridged. It is the poetry of that connection in daily life and the imagination. The great river floods, a blue wasp sails dreamlike through the house. Suddenly a copperhead lies snake-thick across the hiker’s path.
The poet’s “mind is at once local and transcendent in its reach,” says the writer William Benton, and “local” here means the western end of Kentucky w...