Ron Houchin. Among Wordless Things. Nicholasville, KY: Wind Publications, 2004. 91 pages. Paperback $14.00. Twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that we find ourselves thrown into an unfathomable, uncaring world; that our quests for the fountain of youth are futile; that we can never hope to understand our existence. Instead, Heidegger insisted, we must clear a path through our cluttered, object-filled world of deadening routines and follow it with passionate conviction, while confronting the certainty of death and the ultimate meaninglessness of life. Ron Houchin is a poet Heidegger would have admired. In Houchin's third collection of poems, he continues his passionate conviction of using poetic language to search for human meaning. In images memorable and lovely, shocking and jarring, Houchin both celebrates and bemoans our humanness, our inadequacies of body and spirit, our inevitable descent into emptiness, our knowledge that "growing up / is the metaphor for death." Among Wordless Things is Houchin's first American publication. His previous works were distributed to American audiences through Salmon Publishing of Ireland. Among Wordless Things is also a prizewinner , garnering the Appalachian Writers Association Book of the Year Award for Poetry in 2005. A retired public high school English teacher, a successful and seasoned wordsmith and journeyman, Ron Houchin brings an unmistakable existential worldview to his poetry. This collection is sustained by themes of despair and alienation rendered in sensory language. The darkest of emblems—shadows, graves, hollow caves, and empty wells—bloom with surprise and desire as Houchin explores an unfathomable world. "The Boy Who Fell Through Howell's Mill" recalls a tragic experience to map the "memory of the taste / of rusting iron / ... the smell of cold stone": Bequeathed to us was the time still ticking in our flesh as we held onto his under ice water, the strangling gargle of falls falling and holding under all that plunged there. 78 The poet's learned lesson is a hard one: "the cold sting of understanding that this / is the way the world is." In "Far End" a cemetery caretaker who had "finished college in English literature / and found no work among the living" spends his days puttering around headstones, "patting and caressing / dull berets of moss, / adjusting gray-white shawls / of lichens, as if on the shoulders / of little marble grandfathers" while black elms in the grave yard continue to grow "out of the dead / like dreams of lost form / or forgotten humanity." When the poet describes Van Gogh's famous "The Night Cafe," the light threatens "to side with darkness any second" and alienation is certain: "everything touches but is isolated" and everyone is ultimately "forever on his own." In "The O's" the poet uses assonant rhyme to restate the precarious human condition: Smoke rings blown out the evening window, losing their form in the night sky, show there's nothing human about the world except the name we give it. The poet chases after meaning in nature, in the human body, in family, in poetry, but finds small comfort and certainly no answers. In "Mattress Sky" the West Virginia landscape is upside down, "thick and gray," and makes "a quilt you turn facedown on / and sleep in keen wakefulness / .. . leaves your face in the open earth / staring all night at constellations / of the dead spinning below." In "The Surgeon Considers the Soul" a skilled physician never finds "the soul at home in the distant / caverns of the brain / or the violent tides of the heart." Perhaps not convinced that the soul doesn't exist, the surgeon decides . . . there's hope that the whole body's a kind of acorn and something will break out once the shell falls, using the dying experience to fertilize the future. Family ties provide little reassurance for the poet either. In "Appalachian Letter" the poet addresses his grandfathers and uncles who are as ominous and foreboding as the heavy clouds crouched "over the hills, hunchbacks / to the mines." And in "Model Fire Building" a young speaker finds escape from his threatening family inside a cave: 79 I played there in the thin darkness and built small fires to keep the big bodies out... . Where some boys built model trains...