Wrested from the coppery, keen claws of existential extremity, Constance Merritt’s second collection of poems, is conventional in its forms and radical in its reaching back to the ground of being and to the originality and immediacy of our first encounters with language. Forgoing the common hedge of irony, these poems, without apology, place their bets on elemental language, intentional grace, and tradition in all its fruitfulness and freight. By turns passionate and distant, these poems manage at once to ensnare and elude us, and in their urgent quest for clarity seldom fail to compel us.