The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics

In the first two sections of The Draw of Broken Eyes & Whirling Metaphysics, Brooks explores the everyday in language that's at once lyrical and lively. There is nothing of the academic in lines like "Kerouac drank double time / because he was lumped in with junkie friends" or "little towns don't wear time well," but everything of the real. In the startlingly brilliant third section, "The Gateman's Hymn of Ignoracium," Brooks jumps from the quotidian to the mythic. He takes on the same subject matter as Dante and Milton, the Great War in Heaven and its eternal aftermath. In "Gatesman's Hymn," the narrator is a noncombatant-an angel who didn't take sides in Lucifer's Revolt and thus, as a neutral, sorts out the damned and fits them to apt punishment. In "Soldiers of the Gateman," we see his emissaries, demons from cultures as diverse as the Persian Zoroastrians and the Algonkians. The section ends with the chilling line: "All your sins are remembered." Brooks clearly writes his heart out in every line on every page. -TERENCE HAWKINS, author of American Neolithic