With a few exceptions, the pieces are short, with a disciplined, if not always perfectly cadenced line. In them, rocks and trees are moistened by rain- and snowstorms, and occasionally by broken human flesh, itself unearthed like homesteader sod, but more often scattered over than returned to it. The endangered land is lightly peopled by agrifolk cut from the cloth of Anderson or wielding the tools of Sandburg.

Chromatically, a dusky autumnal palette predominates (with spent leaves bearing a bit more than their fair share of death symbology), though two poems of notable lushness effectively enlist unnatural blues and freak orchids to forswear memories ("The Matriarch's Funeral Dress"), then sunlit Tuscan whitewash to house an unhoped-for re-encounter with the bare- and downy-armed figlia che aveva pianto ("Until We Meet Again").

Narrative passages are capably rendered, their recognizable tone and lyric persona interspersed with imagistic treats:  'She will grow small, wait nearby / like the mice who trail behind the thresher' ("Below the Conklingsville Dam"); 'A red persistence of maple / standing through the cold collapse of Fall / tremors the chill air like rising heat' ("Aberration of Leaf"). In the latter, a demonstration of negative capability rather than the anthropocentric—'The trunk holds to the living head. / The grip of its unseasonable thriving / holds my reluctant eyes  . . . I walk away, among the dead'—might have better fulfilled the promise of its title.

Like Stevens and others, this poet lawyers by day in a mid-size city, but unlike his colleague, is content to leave most argumentation to his clients' non-philosophical disputes. Rock and tree, kin here, sometimes quite convincingly trade natures, though Mr. Bernini's general poetic method tends more to assertion than persuasion:  'As surely as we dance before we creep / our birthright is to dream before we sleep' ("Real Estate"); 'yet who can say it does not wait for us / along the banks, where no death can / outlive the pomegranate tree' ("The Banks of the Stream"). He is least authoritative when he stoops to address the quotidian:  'customers come in and carry off / the dark vitality in paper cups, / heat to fuel dreams / for one hour more' ("In This Donut Shop"), and perceptibly dutiful, but half-hearted, on eternally recurrent current events:  'In my Manhattan, USA, in grammar school, / we learned that Chevrolets, George Washington / and Marilyn Monroe all sprang from your sweet cradle' ("Before Iraq").

Mr. Bernini begins his collection with an inquiry typical of his best perception:  'Who in those rooms could hear / the thread's incessant spin' ("The Owl Who Stole a Photographer's Eye") and soon follows it with, 'What do I really see, besides / the swallows in the folds of stone' ("Stone Church"). He does well to let his contemporaries record the quotidian in what Degas called "eyesight painting," while he draws on his much more mature poetic resources to unveil the world draped by the beneficent spider. 'Before thunder silences the land,' the daring of his small birds that 'fly beyond the treeline through heavy rain' is quite awful enough to earn him a fine reputation.

—MH