Wrested from the coppery, keen claws of existential extremity, Blessings and Inclemencies, Constance Merritt's second collection of poems, is conventional in its forms and radical in its reaching back to the ground of being and to the originality and immediacy of our first encounters with language. Forgoing the common hedge of irony, these poems, without apology, place their bets on elemental language, intentional grace, and tradition in all its fruitfulness and freight.