The possibility seemed exhausted for rocking, contemporaneous, tuneful poetry with a distinctively Yankee accent once John Wieners passed on. Allen Bramhall's Simple Theory pours cold Magnolia water all over such a snag, yielding accelerated pleasure with each drenching verse-postulation of long lifetimes in poetry's perpetual and immediate surroundings: grace, ardor-gazing, day-to-day crisis. Don't let these blocks of prose fool you, Simple Theory reads and sings as a 21st-century Inferno-cum-Paradiso, self-regarding narrative thrust along with the attendant versemaster's craft. Bramhall jesters and clowns his way to the top of compassionate detachment--an exceptional achievement.

--Jack Kimball