Points for a Compass Rose

“Somehow Connell makes you care. Many modern poets demand a good deal of work; Connell excites it. Sometimes the note-taker’s [narrator] tone is hectoring, even belligerent; if you have any competitive spirit at all, you seize a thread–any thread–follow it, and lo, it traces a pattern. . . you understand at last that these notes are not tentative explorations, and far less are they ‘expression: ‘ they are instead the magnificent artifices of a giant intellect…

“These poems are masterpieces. You could bend a lifetime of energy to their study, and have lived well. The fabric of their meaning is seamless, inexhaustible. . . their language is steely and bladelike; from both of its surfaces flickering lights gleam. Each page sheds insight on every other page; understanding snaps back and forth, tacking like a sloop up the long fjord of mystery.”–Annie Dillard, Harper