The Great Wheel

Here, in his fifth book, Paul Mariani uses the trope of the wheel to chart the kinds of losses we all face in living: deaths and separations, lost loves, lost friends, lost happiness. The wheel of fortune, a ferris wheel ridden with a friend now dead, Dante's paradisal wheel, the wheel of the morning sun, by turns call up Hart Crane and Wilfrid Owen, Stevens and Williams, Whitman and Hopkins.