rooks Haxton is in the enviable position of being as well-known as a poet as a translator, particularly from the French of Victor Hugo and the immensely difficult ancient Greek of Heraclitus. Given roots thrust thus deeply, it is immediately remarkable to the sensible reader how difficult it has become to detect influence of classical styles and forms in Haxton's poems. Such seeds as have been gathered from ancient groves are so deeply lain that they are imperceptible. Unlike the vivid classical flowers garlanded on trellises last year by Susan Mitchell in Erotikon or Anglo-Saxon myths hewn high on sandstone columns in the 1970s by Geoffrey Hill in Mercian Hymns, Haxton tends to allow diffuse classical motifs to spread their long boughs over his lawn. It may be nearly impossible to feel the compression of a Greek epitaph in narrative poems such as 'Teenage Ikon', but their philosophical weight can still be registered, sometimes in an altogether more playful manner, as in 'Author's Bio': "Son of a Maori priestess and a Tasmanian pirate, / Brooks Haxton at two was thrown as a human sacrifice / from the gunwale of a careening brig into a typhoon." Haxton entirely reintegrates classical positions into contemporary personal environments, as in 'All the Immortals Ever Think About is Sex', which is preceded by an epigraph familiar to the educated reader as the pivotal line from Catullus's fifth Carmina: "Nox est perpetua una dormienda," which I have in the past translated with a classical archaeologist as "there is but a single endless night." (Though I'm a meager Latinist when set alongside both she and Haxton, I will defend my translation in this particular setting by explaining that its sentiment is borne out by Haxton's poem, though his own partial translation, which appears in the poem, is sonically closer to the Latin as "sleep perpetual"; it is also helpful to know that the two preceding lines in Catullus's poem are "Soles occidere et redire possunt: / Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux.") Haxton deploys both the playfulness and stoicism of the ancient Greeks and the canny humor of the imperial Romans in Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero. There is a distinct sense of unwavering moral duty in the face of an uncaring world—"Nobody saw him, leaning from his wheelchair into the pain"—but there is also a snapshot of the author drinking whiskey and reading, an example of "Lethe", the river of forgetfulness in the underworld (anyone who has attempted to read while drunk understands this notion fully). Despite this impossible span of historical-stylistic distance, there are also the tones of the classical epigram mingled with lighter Asian poetic forms used by poets in English after Ezra Pound's experiments with ideograms via the earlier translations of Ernest Fenollosa and haiku-like verse forms in the wake of the Beats: "The touch of a wingstroke on the pond / shattered the constellations east" describes his feelings after having made his loved one cry. The title poem of the collection is a fanciful retelling of Archimedes's famous realization—one hesitates to call it a discovery—of the displacement of water, running naked into the sunny streets shouting "Eureka!": "How sad, in middle age, to find one's genitals, / and lose one's mind." This segues, or rather spins off, into a history of the number zero, which was, of course, unknown to Archimedes at the time but would not have helped him come to his realization any more easily; the reader will remember that the Greek mathematicians had little use for zero, as they were engaged primarily in geometry, and that the digit zero, when it did enter the European imagination, came via trade routes, because "zero" is a very valuable concept for merchants and businessmen, those who tally and sell; the poem winds up with the philosophical recognition that zero, once it "existed", denoted that which does not exist: "Division / into zero, and by zero, zero parts of zero, overflowed / into a greater nonexistence where the empty set / lay empty of infinities and finitudes and of itself." More important than such possibly profound divagations (it must be said that Haxton is no Rilke or Ammons) is a very telling fact that is not made explicit in the book but shall be now, and it explains Haxton's true strength as a poet, his sense of humor: when he describes Archimedes as a naked middle-aged man running through the streets of the Greek city of Syracuse on Sicily cupping his genitals and shouting "Eureka", Haxton could hardly have been ignorant of the fact that he is a middle-aged man living in Syracuse, New York, having just alighted upon a exhilarating subject for a poem. One assumes he was clothed, at least in the literal sense.

—Ernest Hilbert