<p>Whether set adrift in a marsh or canal traversing battlefields or beaches or wading the disorienting streams of adolescence and male identity readers of <em>Surface Fugue</em> will engage with questioning poignancy and imagination the layers of history stifled by modernity.&nbsp;Plunging us through the ambiguous surfaces of time into the proximities of water-borne violence predation and occupation Sneeden maintains perspective and scale with timely anchorages in the coves of elegy and personal memory.&nbsp;Vivid and experiential these poems deliver reverie and threat with equal power; as the poet's description of refraction suggests ...a dipping oar /is able to inhabit both worlds.</p>