Catherine Barnett, _Human Hours_

THE YOUNG SON we read of in Game of Boxes is now grown up and on his own? How did that happen? It hasn't been that long, has it? Maybe it has.

Human Hours (poetry book of the year for The Believer) is, I would say, noticeably more bruised and melancholy than Game of Boxes, but still free of self-pity. Beckett is a tutelary presence here, the mood often "I can't go on, I'll go on."

Barnett is as crafty as ever:

Time is an anemone, says the new hire.
Enemy. Amenity. Profanity. Dire.

"Calamity ends with amity," she notes elsewhere.

Four sections titled "Accursed Questions" structure the book. The questions do seem the kind that lurk in dark corners--"Why did I so rarely mention love when we were holding each other?"--but they also contain a dry, gingery Beckett humor--"Without much hope I opened my first small bottle of 3-in-One oil and applied it to the hinges of my front door that apparently keep my neighbor up at night."

Any number of things seem to have gone off the rails in these poems ("Doctors agree I need to get laser holes made in my eyes"), but that may be okay ("Failure is hot right now"). We have Beckett on the Jumbotron (What? Oh...Josh, not Samuel). And we have Nietzsche, with poems near volume's end titled "Eternal Recurrence" ("I am mortality, I can still hear him say / between kisses I remember to this day," that one ends) and "Amor Fati":

We slid the dictionaries from the shelves
And opened them to apocalypse,

The word on everyone's lips.
O lips!--

As if we could ever bid these joys farewell.