Makings of Happiness

Ronald Wallace is the author of seven books of poetry, including: Long for This World: New and Selected Poems; The Uses of Adversity; Time's Fancy; and People and Dog in the Sun. His works of literary criticism include: God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry; The Last Laugh: Form and Affirmation in the Contemporary American Comic Novel; and Henry James and the Comic Form. Wallace is Halls-Bascom Professor of English, Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry, and codirector of the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Being has 'no unbearable lightness' here. The poems are fat (a recurring word) with memory, love, humor (don't miss the poem about poetry, 'Building an Outhouse'), the world (the poet's parents, wife, children, the goats, chickens, cats, frogs, fox). And there are many nourishing servings of sound and sense, all, as in the huge "The Fat of the Land,' a feast set against 'the noncaloric dark.' And yes, there are, during this picnic of a book, times when lightning strikes and the hair rises.