Galileo's Banquet

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Summary: Where Past and Future Meet
Review: Ned Balbo's first collection is richly textured, balancing darkness and light in lyric, evocative poems. The book touches on broad human concerns--love and loss, mankind's desire to transcend circumstance and limitation, and the human story of "merciless need" as approached through art, film, and metaphors of space. Like the cosmographers, astronomers, and artists he writes about, Balbo's driving ambition is wonder, and each of the masks he adopts--including such diverse characters as Elizabeth Frankenstein and Vermeer's executor, the miscroscopist Leeuwenhoek--allow him to "behold a hidden universe."

In the more autobiographical work of section two, Balbo's poems about the troubled women in his family take a shrewd look at the way fate is determined by boundaries of gender and class. Elsewhere, Balbo is drawn to subjects and moments where "past and future meet." "Grissom Way," for instance, reenacts a drive though a Hauppauge, New York neighborhood whose roads are named for the Mercury astronauts, prompting an on-the-spot reflection about failed space missions and cultural amnesia. This remarkable collection's dark undertones and themes of tragic loss are moderated by compassion, wit, and playfulness. Galileo's Banquet introduces a poet of unusual range who moves with ease between free and formal verse.