than the more baroque Spanish-language poets of midcentury. Unfortunately, while Vaughn Dobel’s name is listed on the cover, her biography is not included within the book, an oversight I hope can be corrected for the next volume in the series. The last line of the book’s title poem, “Nine Coins,” a brief prose poem, relates life in a phrase that could equally well describe Pintado’s collection, in the best possible sense: “Someone was tossing coins into the water. Life was like that: a perception most strange, and nothing more.” David Shook Los Angeles Gibbons Ruark. The Road to Ballyvaughan. Durham, North Carolina. Jacar Press. 2015. 68 pages. This masterful collection begins with a foreword in which Gibbons Ruark describes how his association with Ben Kiely awakened his interest in his own Irish heritage and the writing of these poems, dedicated to Kiely and Seamus Heaney. This establishes for the reader an understanding that these are not poems of tourism but of the discovery of ancient and contemporary kinship. The road to Ballyvaughan is not an easy one, for one must pass by a statue of “the Virgin / Who looks blindly out for the nine young ones dredged up / Body by body, scarcely recognizable . . . [Who] stands there blind as water in their remembrance.” One must also pass “the tomb of Conor O’Brien.” Yes, there will be reminders of our tenuous existence but also friendship, wildflowers, pubs, music (particularly singing), the sea, cliffs, Irish politics, and the intimacy of lovers . The Road to Ballyvaughan, then, is the arc of a life; its section titles begin, ironically, with “Departures” and then lead to sections entitled “Clare,” “Galway,” “Mountain Rain to River Shine,” “Monaghan,” “Dublin,” and “Arrivals,” the final section comprised of only one poem, “Lightness in Age.” We see a generally eastward movement, suggestive of a journey to origins and arrival in old age and its “lightnesses,” such as the “new lightness ” of “a long-known kiss” now “back-lit by the glow / Of that consuming first one fifty years ago.” These are poems that look quietly and speak quietly, calm enough with time enough not just to recall but to feel the past, the past that informs our present, the full length of the river coming to the mouth of its present and, in this case, the mouth of the poet who sings quietly for those who would hear. In these poems we hear also the ancient kinship of poetry and music, particularly song. Ruark writes primarily in iambic meter with pentameter lines, frequently in the form of sonnets or blank verse. He does not confuse “free verse” with the reckless abandonment of the qualities of the English language itself, its accentual-syllabic rhythms, its tonal registers and sonic textures. Instead, he brings the full inheritance of Englishlanguage poetry into its current, living, contemporary voice. These poems are gardens, not forests, but they are naturalistic gardens that find the exact place on the ledge of speech where ordinary expression lifts off into song. Take, for example, these completely unassuming lines: “I sit with Mick McGinn and watch the swallows / Dipping till they nearly touch the roadway.” The subtle weave of assonance and consonance (e.g., the occurrence of the short “i” sound five times in the first six syllables), does not demonstrate itself but quietly persuades the reader with its music, “a text as fine as a feather.” Line after line, we are delighted by the perfect aptness and beauty of expression in these poems—quiet, calm poems whose steady, nuanced music leaves the reader restored to himself and tapered into thought. Fred Dings University of South Carolina Ko Ko Thett The Burden of Being Burmese Zephyr Press Filled with cutting statements critiquing colonization, his country, and himself, these poems reflect on the expat’s identity as a poet and Burmese man. Frequently used but tweaked idioms and expressions suit both poetic purposes and the humorous yet acerbic communication of Thett’s message as he explains the burden of his title. Such burdens extend past the borders of the country to problems that everyone must face in an increasingly industrialized world. Kalpna Singh-Chitnis Bare Soul Partridge...