In the Little House

-There are books that leave us, once we have turned the last page, with a soft, clear tone that overrides ideas or emotional impressions. It is the music of grief and desire, when grief and desire have become indistinguishably joined. Jenn Habel's In the Little House is such a collection. 'No one told me it would be so impersonal . . .' says its speaker, 'my charge/ to be her globe, then station, / then something in a warm wind. . .' How beautiful a book that so embodies its subject matter, an emptiness from which children are born and poems imagined. How difficult a resolution to release a child in small increments, a world whose loveliness can only move continuously away. Habel's poems are the little houses of that world: in which first memories and first words are right now being made.---David Keplinger