By Robert Gillespie

Barter Ira Sadoff University of Illinois Press (2003)

Ira Sadoff's new collection of poems, Barter, opens with an epigraph from Rilke's Duino Elegies that lights the poet's way into "the fleeting world, which in some strange way / keeps calling us. Us, the most fleeting of all. /. . . [E]ven if only once: / to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing."

"Apprentice to the pasture, I linger like music," the speaker says in "Fox Crossing a Field." The world calls. The poem, the response to the call, fixes the moment. When "the light comes on," it's the light in a birch grove, the light in the window reflecting back the eye looking out, the light of epiphany: "how calm the eye is. It's a monastery," he concludes, an image of peace and oneness.

Sadoff (English) turns his eye to the natural world, politics, the past, personal relationships, the English language. Whether he takes on Vietnam, Iran, wetlands or an ex-husband--"a shred of a man, / a sliver, a desperate fighter cut on the lid, blindly / pummeling my opponent before going down," or whether "the whistling parts of the story / take over the trembling parts," his complex poems engage a scene indirectly, slantwise, the way the eye in darkness reflexively looks to the side of a thing to take it in. Images caught on the fly in surprise or pain slyly offer themselves to fleeting time, bartering for understanding--and for time.