As When, in Season

Poetry. Jim Schley's first full-length collection of poems is made of sequences that turn upon phases of living--traveler, apprentice, homesteader and new parent, then troubled but still engaged citizen of a village and a world. At the book's center is a suite of portraits of crucial teachers, where the conventional relation of female muses to male artist is reversed, as these muses are virtuosos, masters of survival and creation. "I like these poems immensely. What Schley has done is to reinvent the ode, especially in the nine poems for the muses. Prosodically he's discovered an odic tone, grave but graceful, imaginatively objective. It's extremely effective, and it tokens a very large degree of literary depth and experience"--Hayden Carruth.