Composing Voices

Robert Pack's new volume of poetry, Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues, is a fabulously expanded version of his 1984 book, Faces in a Single Tree. In each of the poems a single person is talking to one other person to whom he is intimately related, creating deep dramatic tension: a father talking to a bereaved daughter or puzzled son; a sister confronting a sister gone astray or a brother to whom she is confessing her compromised pregnancy; husbands and wives, old and young, reviewing some crisis of their lives together. Combined with these human dramas are the dramas of nature. Pack inherits Robert Frost's sensitivity to the minutiae of spectacle and evolution, the mysteries of God and Darwin's theories. He regards these with humor and compassion. And, perhaps miraculously, but surely most wisely, he does it all within the regulations and beauties of blank verse. Pack has added to his first cycle of monologues some characters who are not necessarily related by blood. Here we find relations of professional intimacy-lawyer and client, doctor and patient. All possible human concerns are excavated in these poems: humans and God, humans and the environment, humans and their most significant others, including pet monkeys and ghosts. All these characters are, of course, the creations of a single mind, that of the author's. In this new book, Pack has included a prologue and epilogue that explain his rationale for such a work of human exploration through fictional invention. His Prologue opens thus: Perhaps I can convince you that I am/ quite like the other characters you'll meet / within with book-although I have a life / that's more than words where we, alas/ Dear Reader, here in this country / where bright orchestrated words are all / the measured air we can accommodate." And the "Author's Epilogue" begins thus: "Go little book, get the hell out of here, / I've had enough of these imagines lives/ invented to augment my finite own." About the Author Among Robert Pack's eighteen books of poetry, his most recent collections are: Elk in Winter(2004), Rounding It Out(1999), Minding the Sun(1996), and Fathering the Map: New and Selected Later Poems(1993), all published by the University of Chicago Press. Pack's poetry focuses on such major themes as man's relationship to nature, and human intimacy-friendships and family relationships. His most recent book of criticism, Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost, was published in 1993 by the New England University Press, a study of Frost in the tradition of nature poetry. Pack's earlier collections of essays, The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft and Affirming Limitswere published by the University of Massachusetts Press.