Catherine Barnett, _The Game of Boxes_

JAMES LAUGHLIN WINNER for 2012. The first of its three sections ("Endless Forms Most Beautiful") is my favorite. Sixteen of its thirty poems (all brief, few more than twenty lines) are in the "I" voice of a single mother taking care of a young son, the other fourteen (all titled "Chorus") in a "we" voice recalling childhood. The "we" poems seem based more on memory of the speaker's own childhood than on an attempt to imagine her way into her son's perspective, and that feels very true to me--virtually every day of caring for my kids put me in mind of something from my own childhood, sometimes in an overwhelmingly immediate Proust's-madeleine kind of way. The counterpoint in this section is delicate but effective.

I liked the rest of the book, too, though not quite as much. The middle section, "Of All Faces," has just one poem, "Sweet Double, Talk-Talk,"  a suite of 24 short poems about a love affair. What was most distinct for me as I read was that the sequence began with "you," then shifted to "he," going from giddy-ecstactic direct address to the lover ("If you want I'll / cover you with my body") to somewhat more distant and doubting speculation about him ("His face is a clue to me but I don't know / what it means"). This did not seem to bode well. I hope things worked out.

The final section in some ways seems to pick up from the first, but the "we" voice is gone, as though it has now been incorporated into the "I" voice as the son gets older, perhaps a bit more independent, so that the "I" voice has time to focus on more of its own concerns.

It's a tender, vulnerable book. I'm grateful to it for reminding me of something I had forgotten, how my late dad would play the game of boxes with me when we were trapped somewhere boring.