Any Old Wolf

Poetry. Murray Silverstein's first collection of poems revels in the inscrutable world, in the joy of words, and in the essential human task of carving those words to fit that world. Silverstein's lifelong career as an architect subtly imbues poem after poem; the reader has a powerful sense of the author building each poem: its foundation dug and poured, its lines framed, finished, finally lived in: the miracle of raw materials-word and deed-brought to life. Part memoir, part prayer, part light-footed dance, Silverstein's poetry shows metrical control, subtle internal rhyme, and Hopkins's prosodic beats: the diction of the day unfurled. It plays not simply with metaphor but with the idea of metaphor, and pulls the reader in: to discovery, to the sway of language, and to the great and complex machinery of what Silverstein calls "the factories of desire."