Second Messengers by Robert McNamara

These are fluid, meditative poems, personal in their memories and reflections on the sensuous experience of love, on the pain of distance, absence, loss. There are wounds here, the universal injuries on which we all harbor, however deeply. McNamara asks, "who does not know/ how resolutely we dress for hard weather, and the soft place/ we shelter underneath?" In poetry both complex and satisfying, Second Messenger explores the relationship of language to subject, of the intellectual to the personal. The language here multiplies meanings, seeks a sense of metamorphosis.