Love's Answer

Book excerpt: This is Michael Heffernan's fourth book of poetry, the work of a masterful and deeply intelligent practitioner at the height of his maturity. A pleasurable, wry, sweet book, full of prayers against the difficult passage of the night. Despite the surface demeanor, some of these poems seem to be rendered in a state of spiritual disquiet. There is also a powerful intellectual quarrel which Heffernan infuses in his work and through which he attempts to discover a sustaining metaphor rather than a rational conclusion.