"Slip," by Cullen Bailey Burns (New Issues/WesternW Michigan University, 61 pages, $15)
"Of course we are beautiful in our remembering," Cullen Bailey Burns writes in "Nostalgia."
"The land's / slope and give, the way pines also cling / to curve and inclination and somehow I am back / at desire."
In her second book of poetry, a finalist this year for a Minnesota Book Award, Burns keeps circling back to the word "desire." Nestled in carefully crafted images, ordered stanzas and controlled syntax, desire is an abstraction, not a hot-burning emotion.
Burns' restraint can distance the reader, but also surprise with moments of realization.
"After the War" begins "Birds hold the moon up" and ends describing a marriage: "tumbled so, / bloodied, trailing a little light." She writes about the beautiful birds and the broken marriage in the same measured syntax.
The speaker examines memories, trying to get details right as if they hold an elusive clue. She writes, "legs entwined in what?" or "he said / am? Was?"
A greater loss haunts these poems. Hinted at in images, it is a loss the speaker can approach only the edges of. It is the story of a girl "very far away, so far we must imagine her face."