This sophisticated first collection by Jim Powell synthesizes personal and world history to produce a compelling vision of the past, through verse letters to friends and relatives, translations of Horace, Propertious, Sappho, and others, and allusions to ancient figures of history and mythology. "His title burns away everywhere in the volume, in the fevers of eros, divination, memory, destruction, and grief...Page for page, there is more sheer fine, clear, yet syntactically subtle and metaphorically gorgeous writing in Powell than I have seen in some time."--Mary Kinzie, Poetry "Jim Powell's poems, like those of Thomas Hardy, are haunted forms, full of ghosts and mocking gods, shadows and foreshadowings. But Powell is a Hardy whose poems we've never read, a Hardy with his hand in the blaze, not stirring the ash in a cold and wind-torn grate."--Jennifer Clarvoe, The Threepenny Review