Of Cautious Steps

I want to get this right / to climb into your sentences insists Darren Black's speaker in one of the poems in Of Cautious Steps. Indeed, these poems, which survey the collapse of eyesight, which proffer currents and faith / that crest and wane in slow decay, whose Braille-trained fingertip skims, finds only the margin / a disconnected phone, burned linoleum, / a bottle's perfect mouth, get things right with a heady and remarkable consistency from start to finish. To measure is to hope, as Black tells us, and it is our hearts that are measured by these poems, so precisely wise, so surefooted in their glorious craft and hopeful imagination. Tom Daley, author, Far Cry