Rain Through High Windows

These poems slow the planet so gradually that all adapt to its halt; one forgets that time should be passing, accepts the poet’s “static divine” and lets “hours line up like saints.” Each poem loses us further in Hoeppner’s wilderness: his natural world is held lightly on the tongue until it dissolves; his patience allows us to listen as “the full moon in soft Italian whispers off the balcony, parsing bluish dust . . . ” This is a book that finds peace not in consequence but in the innocence of result, the slip into what comes after.