Stone Postcard

The title poem in Stone Postcard is a passionate drama that thinks through the close kinship of solace and trauma, something neither private nor public, and always waiting. The book as a whole moves with that spacious idea. The focus is intense, as you might expect. The tone, at the same time, is often laconic. There are two Parts. The first, starting with a birth and fractured family, has an intimate scope; the second carries questions of belonging out to wider horizons. Paul Magee's variety takes in a policeman embracing an exploding man in Iraq, the international committee that met to recalibrate the metre in 1983, a keyhole view, a toddler at the beach, visits to an office of Employment Plus, and to New Jersey. Virgil's detailed, horrific account of war's chaos in the siege of Latium unfolds a nine-page climax to the book.