The Net
Daniel Tobin
Unified by its theme of metamorphosis, these poems descend deeply into subjects as divergent as a jetty that disappears during high tide, to a talking parasitical head, to a sandlot baseball legend, to a famine road in Ireland, to Orpheus, to Wittgenstein, to a murdered poet and his wife, and finally to grave personal loss, tracing through all of its many attentions the thread that binds the physical to the metaphysical—a psychic passage from death back to life again.
“Fly and Cricket,” from The Net:
Its ear attunes homage to those wings
that would entice a consort's tailored song.Where carapace affects a telephone
it listens beyond longing's least uneaseto hear inside a trigger-scale of notes
like a rapper's staccato hail of words--the key that calls the quiet gamut out
writhing, to burrow in the singer's gut.Down there what governs and endures is this:
a screeching in the music of the sphereswhere one of all that symphony will feed
on living meat until the husk exhumes.So out pulses shroud-faced Eurydice
with Orpheus's body for its womb.