Family Portrait with Scythe: Poems

James Owens' stunning valediction, both for and forbidding mourning, slices with steely memory to the "wet bone." Stumbling with a boy's "ignorant gravity," Owens cannot right the "unbalanced accounts" of his miner father's sooty lungs, his parents' exhausted marriage—nor his own professed failings. Yet his keen eye in and of the natural world does lead to the scales balanced, if precariously—in belonging "on the brief earth," in parsing spring from grief, in "the good story of the body" wh...