E.D. Blodgett’s newest work uses elemental imagery of stones, moons, roses, flesh, and fire to pursue passionately spiritual meditations on relationships, mortality, and language. The atmosphere of prayerful tenderness in these poems recalls the paintings of Chagall. So, too, do the recurring images of horses, children, and stars. Yet there’s a probing intellect at work beneath the often charming, even hypnotic, surface of these poems.

Although there are 66 poems in this volume, each one is essentially a variation upon a single poetic gesture. Blodgett confines himself to a scrupulously limited palette of images, turning each “bird,” “moon,” and “rose” over and over like rosary beads. As anyone who has read a good villanelle or sestina can confirm, with such repetition an image can both gain depth and lose definition. Blodgett is a master of the shimmering, choral effects language can attain through such techniques.

As a poetic device, “apostrophizing” means addressing an absent person – or even an abstraction like “mortality” – as if they were present and listening. Blodgett uses this device to pursue the ancient Orphic notion that we create our listeners, our worlds, and ourselves through generative speech. In other words, we are the words we speak, “our origin an exhalation of / the you and me that are suspended in our mouths.” So does that mean we are here, and “here” is here, thanks only to some apostrophizing voice? And is the voice here only because we ask it what it is?

While these questions can have both a serious and a humorous side, Blodgett’s voice remains solemn here. And while Apostrophes IV is another rich and accomplished collection from a highly refined imagination, writing this elevated and rarefied, like a poetic mountaintop, can only be visited for a short while before the reader should return to street level.