Harborage Press, 2005 ($20)

This big, attractive hardcover book by Buffalo poet and longtime Kenmore West teacher Loren Keller includes hundreds of poems written over the course of six decades. As such, it gives the reader a view of the world as seen through the quiet, earnest eyes of a poet. Keller typically writes short, tight works, like the one printed here:

BETWEEN US

Because your face

is never twice,

is always new

(Some shade of moon

soft crescents it,

some wisp of mood

tints tilts)

I hold the warm known

fabric of your voice

up to the light

between your

unremembered lips

and my deft

listening eyes

Each carefully chosen word suggests something more than its usual meaning. But Keller often expands these brevities into longer, more full-bodied sequences of poems, which can run for as many as eight or nine pages.

In a short review, its hard to give a sense of the whole, but some of my favorite poems in this collection include: “The Skier and the Snow,” a touching elegy that ends with the haunting lines, “we will listen always to the lovely/windrush of his skis;” “Hostage,” which looks at the terrorism of the Ayatollah Khomeini-era with a thinking person’s skepticism; “Hermit Island,” an appreciation of an ocean-edge campground; and “Suicide Prevention Center,” which shifts perspectives between caller and counselor: “I slowly pull out/of your pain and feel/mine draw its skin/again around me.”

But I think my favorite of Keller’s poems is “Miniature,” in which a dancer’s performance is observed as if through the small end of a telescope. It begins: “Lights like silver/needles/One tiny/dancer pirouettes.” The list of memorable poems goes on and on — the book is nearly two inches thick! Keller’s poems are warm, accessible and shimmering with emotion. I suggest you read them.

—anni brill

Loren Keller reads at the Center for Inquiry (1310 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, 636-4869) on Wednesday (Feb. 1) at 7:30pm.