The Clerk's Tale: Poems
"Inside everything was Episcopalian— / the wicker chaise lounges, the small spotted mirrors, / the rattan dining room set, the tears." Reece's evocation of a family house on Cape Cod, eventually sold, exemplifies the twin currents of detached humor and sorrow that run through his début collection. The most effective poems here are autobiographical, recording early family life; a period spent recovering from a nervous breakdown in hospitals and borrowed houses ("My legacy is to leave the room empty"); and a new life in retail—hence the title. Reece's poems are saved from solipsism by a keen alertness to the characters around him and to the consolations of the natural world. Animals please him, because they are happier than people—"The ponies said: This day astounds us. The field is green." And resignation brings with it a kind of peace, as in a poem written on the poet's birthday in a lonely Florida town: "It is not Paris it is not Florence / but it has majesty in its anonymity."Copyright © 2005The New Yorker