Poetry. What is most wonderful about this enormously impressive collection of poems of George Bilgere is the sustained excellence of poem after poem, with never a false note. The reader's expectations are quickly raised high, and never disappointed. This alone would make the book remarkable, but its riches are of many kinds. In its fine evocations of American settings, its vivid portraits of vanished lives, human and non-human, its celebratory delight in language brilliantly deployed, it seems to me a landmark -- Anthony Hecht. George Bilgere won the Devins Award for his first collection, THE GOING, and his work has appeared in many magazines, from Poetry and Field to Shenandoah and The Sewanee Review.