The Oysters I Bring to Banquets

Gary Geddes’s new collection of lyrics and poem-sequences ranges from whimsical poems about the building of a greenhouse to the struggle of characters in classical legends to cope with the interference of close relatives and extended family, the gods. And poems about Yukon adventures and the wonders and plight of monarch butterflies in Mexican highlands. It’s also a diverse gathering of elegies for friends, literary luminaries, creatures and natural habitats in a world under siege, but also...