Mark Kraushaar

The moment I set eyes on the poem 'Third Street Muscles and Fitness', which appears on the publisher's website, I knew I was going to love this collection. 'Third Street...' is a great poem, set on a rainy evening at the local gym. It opens with six men and their macho humour, but quickly dissolves into something altogether more sobering.

At its heart, 'The Uncertainty Principle' is a fatalistic work, dealing with the challenges of living in 'the bone weary, wounded world'. There's an show more inevitable cynicism in these poems, exemplified in 'Now Playing', which sees a young soldier heading off to war, his head full of the things he intends to do upon his return. 'Of course,' says our narrator, 'we all know he's shot dead or loses his legs... If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.'

This dark undercurrent flows throughout the length of the book, but above it there's a gentle humanity. 'The Fallout Shelter Handbook', which describes a recollected discussion of the proposed building of a fallout shelter around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, reads as a tribute to Kraushaar's father and an affirmation of basic human decency in the face of cold logic. Sitting around the dinner table, discussing plans for the shelter, the children raise concerns for their neighbours. What if they were to need somewhere to shelter? 'We would let them in,' says the father, despite his wife's objection. And what about their friends, and the Johnson twins, and the local bully? 'We would let them in.' And the brother's pet snake, and the sister's cat? 'We would let them in.'

It couldn't possibly happen, of course, but that's not the point. The protagonist in this poem, as in most of the pieces in this collection, has a choice in how he reacts to the senselessness and sadness of the world. It's a choice we have, too - we can succumb to despair, or we can respond with 'a sort of mild, unaccountable calm'. The suggestion, implicit in almost all of these poems, that we take the latter option, strikes me as a pretty good idea. show less