With a bow to recent masters like Justice, Wright, and even Nemerov, John Morris s poems explore the uncertain footing of middle age. The characters we meet are clear-eyed, straight-faced, occasionally nonplussed. They re uncertain of their allegiance to either comfort or anguish. And their ciphering of the debts and credits of their days creates little dramas we can recognize as something like our own. Cars are rust-colored, late-modeled; poems twist into failing origami; and an old high school yearbook needs a vacation. It needs a drink. The lines dissect moments and events as if each...