For Lack of a Calling

Mark DeCarterets poems wear their elegant disillusionment lightly as if they knew that only by losing our projections do we see clearly: The same ad for dawn again. How Ive mastered/ its theme song but not the game show that follows. These lovingly made poems charged with wit and uncanny insights into our quotidian linger on all thats unstill: the sea deer the self. Anything not solid is at a loss until the poet endows it with language. Giving the lie to the books title are the signs of vocation everywhere evident in these savvy and unsparing pages.-- Askold Melnyczuk founder of AGNI