The collection works because these signs appear only as tracery. The poems here are delicately allusive. If I did not know these writers, I could still walk toward Bower Lodge with the Wanderer.

Yet there are other ways for a poet to work with all he has seen. For contrast, look to the mammoths of twentieth-century poetry Geoffrey Hill, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, David Jones: all prodigiously well-acquainted with “all the best that has been thought and said,” and unafraid of writing from the top of the mountain, as it were. These poets sit on a heap of beautiful things collected from far and wide, and they say, “Come up and see what we have seen!” They make it seem good up there. But it is a long, weary slog to join them.

All of these gigantic poets were poets of the waste land, and so, I think, is Pastor. But he takes a different path through. He walks the path of burying what he has seen very deeply and then inviting us to come look at what has bloomed.

We see this image in the first poem of Bower Lodge. There, we read, “You are not only what is seen. / You are like what happens when / a desert shifted in a lost land, / like a pyramid long swallowed / by fine sand. […] but / underfoot / you lie entire.” This is a new way to imagine the waste land. We are not kings who stride across it; rather, we are civilizations stuck beneath its surface.

I like the idea that restoring the waste land means restoring myself. In “Gone to Ground,” losing one’s edge becomes (pardon) a double-edged sword: “People asked where I was, but I’d lost my edge. / I got puzzled stares. I lost my edge.” But it also means being able to draw nearer to the slow things, the deep things: “I thought before I spoke—lost my edge. / Dreamed slow useless things and lost my edge. Became stories, not sermons.”

I hope countless people read Pastor’s book. I do not hope that many will imitate it—not, at least, without taking the time to grasp the difficulties inherent in his style. Many poets are called “Whitmanesque,” and Pastor is among them, but not many deserve it.

I do not like Whitman for many reasons. His particular style of extravagance, nonhierarchical and uncritical, offends my medieval sensibilities. In the Great Dichotomy of American verse, my sympathies are with Miss Dickinson. That is partly because of the illusion of ease within Whitman’s style, which continues to lure passionate imitators into trespass and presumption. Emily’s Verses have the Ease that is the hallmark of great Art (“There’s a certain slant of light” is unmatched in American poetry for both readability and skill), but give a young poet fifteen minutes to try to imitate her and the illusion will be dispelled. Whitman can fool us for much longer, and to our shame.

Pastor knows all this, of course. He is no foolish Whitmanesque adolescent, and his mastery of one vexatious word proves my point. I’ve already quoted the stylistic thing I  do not like that Pastor shares with Whitman: the use of the second person.

That little “you” repeatedly pops up in the book, in at least one of three poems, probably more (I didn’t count). It is a troublesome little word, one that tempts aspiring poets mightily. What can be better than to address the reader directly? says the youthful poet. How better to draw a reader in?

But “you” is a trap, a sinkhole into which dying poems fall and perish. “You,” sloppily employed, means nothing; it indicates that the poet has not considered what his poem is about. The “you” is some unexamined depth of himself. Only the examined depths of the poet’s soul can bear the light, and upon examination often turn out to be less interesting than we thought.   

When Pastor uses the word “you,” it is almost always clear from the language of the poem who—or what—he is speaking to. “Thorn of my thorn, branch of my branch, / what brought you to the river…?” Clearly, the thorn. Or in “To an Arch Enemy,” “If you let me see you, let me…”, clearly “you” is the arch enemy. “Oh, heart beholding/yourself,” obvious.

These are not dissociative “yous” flung into the void of the self. But imitators of Pastor beware: you must know yourself to write this way, and the road to that knowledge leads through Death. The Wanderer of Bower Lodge can speak this way because he has reached out and touched the bedrock beneath our feet, and that bedrock is grief, and loss, and devastation.

It is only after seeing this devastation within and without one’s own self that one can write with any kind of assurance or ethos the words that close this lovely book: “you will /go in peace.”