Also in Arcadia

Andrew Mulvanias Arcadia lies tucked into the rich landscape of rural central Missouri-its cornfields and falling-down barns its rickety old river towns with their repair shops and crackling blacktop roads. Like the earliest Arcadians this fine young poet renders the rough precarious world with formalizing grace odic elegiac tender and dignified. He fuses high literary allusiveness with hands-on knowledge of farm life and he writes so well he makes the complexity of his project its strict and tangled intricacies as clear as the glassy mirror of a morning pond. Also in Arcadia is a belated pastoral a new gift brought forward from an old enchanted living world.