Gibbons Ruark is a poetic naturalist, bending close to his subject to report with precision the complexity of beauty we overlook in our haste. A truly imaginative writer as well, however, Ruark gives back to us not merely mirrored documentation but reflections fully colored by his sight and his spirit; like water and sky, both subject and poet are illuminated in his poems.

Passing Through Customs, a retrospective of thirty years' work, is arranged in clusters of image, feeling, and thought, like runs of a particular kind of music. The reader moves from two coastal poems, years apart on...