In Walking to Cootehill, John Engels has chosen to mix the new with the old, fashioning a fresh order for poems that span the years from 1958 to 1992. A short notation at the end of each poem indicates the title of the original volume from which it was taken, and its date of publication. This idiosyncratic format might be my format for all selecteds. Engels was able to reshape his vision even as he reinforced the fact that it has remained intact. He divided his book into two sections, The Naming and The Unnaming, and to some extent his poems tend toward one category or the other. Some look long at the things of this world; some marvel at they way they disappear, as in fog or forgetfulness. But there is more at stake than the obvious, and a poem entitled Saying the Names can be found in the second section, while Night Bird, with its subtle realization, belongs to the first:

What excites me most about Engels' selection is the way poems from each of his seven volumes fit easily alongside the new poems; what emerges is a sense that here is someone whose life has offered him many moments from which to extract the core of his particulr aesthetic. Like a latter-day Adam, Engels completes the process of naming by loving what he has named: Snowy Owl, Apple Trees, The Walled Garden, Beans, and Bullhead are only a few of the titles. For Patiann Rogers nature is the given, so she reveals her sensibility in her conclusions. Engels usually begins with a defined sensibility which colors perception, then ends with his eye fixed hard on the object of his attention.

For Engels, nature is endlessly alive. Fish jump, dogs bark, gulls slide in from nowhere. Slopes and surfaces are irregular, seas vanish, the earth quakes. And there are storms "internal and external" to complicate the picture. In fact, Engels revels in every contradiction that "lacerates the heart." Walking to Cootehill is an epic of human scale, it follows a cycle from birth (naming) to death (unnaming), with an intimation of resurrection. Here is proof positive of the integrity of the writer; here is a world view, reshuffled and redefined; here is evidence of a man making sense of a lifetime.

Because Engels has carefully documented where and when each poem originally appeared, the reader has the pleasure of sensing the thrust of the individual volumes even as this subsequent one unfolds. One sequence of poems about the death of an infant son in 1965 illustrates just how a writer is never done with material. For Philip Stephen Engels was originally published in 1968. It has the formal elegance of elegy, the rhymes that made it possible to write. Distances (also 1968) maintains the detachment of the rhetorical (O the children die beyond our seeing...), and After Thirteen Years (1981) still worries at the fact of death by imagining the life that might have been:

But Anniversary, published in 1998, comes to terms with the fact that the loss will never be finished, that each October will bring fresh grief, and that even the attempt to measure it against the enormity of Auschwitz makes it no less painful. The death of a son therefore becomes part of the life of the father, informs the questioning (though never skeptical) intellect and fuels the hope of renewal.

"It has been a long walk to Cootehill/and back again, heel and big toe/blistered, the traffic both ways impetuous/along the narrow lanes," says the speaker of the title poem, which comes near the end of the first section. His journey has been both out and back, and along the way there was the stench of death, the chirruping of chaffinches, a limping ram with a thorn in its hoof, and the fear of "breakneck skitterings" of unknown animals. Now

Thus the speaker looks forward and backward, holds his life in precarious balance, ends with an image of mortality, his "unbecoming skull." This is reemphasized in Emergency near the end of the second section, where it is the heart, "swollen to movement/it seems not in disposition to sustain," that fails him. But the poems of Walking to Cootehill are all heart, and so we respond also to the consistent images of immortality the apples in an "error of season" that bloom like flowers in the field, Vivaldi's music like a million "breathing leaves," and the drying tendril (or "last gesture") of the cucumber vine which, as Engels notes, is "how against/all understanding, I choose/to understand it."

The willful act of understanding is a mark of John Engels, poetry. His achievement here is a unified arrangement which strips itself down to the elemental, rises to the occasion of the book's final lines: