Jo McDougall's In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems is filled with magical verse. Take, for example, "How to Imagine How It Will Be When the Doctor Comes Out to Say," from her fifth collection, Dirt:
Think of a man in Holland
the moment he sees a first break in the dike.
Think of Anne Frank at the moment she recognizes
the sound on the stair.
McDougall's work descends from the Imagist poets: H.D., William Carlos Williams, the early Ezra Pound and, today, Gary Snyder and Robert Bly. What Pound would identify as precise visual images is the hallmark of her work. Out of more than 300 poems collected here, only six are longer than a page, many are just a few lines. They are sharp, clear and filled with striking images and metaphors that often are the whole poem. For example, "A Southerner in Kansas Recalls Trees":
Living without them, she takes solace
in hedges or in weeds.
Some nights,
alone in the house,
she lies face down on the wood floor.
There is much humor in McDougall's poems, too, like the lines of "When the Buck or Two Steakhouse Changed Hands" in her second book, The Woman in the Next Booth:
They put plastic over the menus.
They told the waitresses to wear white shoes.
They fired Rita.
They threw out the unclaimed keys
and the pelican with a toothpick
that bowed as you left.
These masterful, quiet, subtle poems flutter about delicately like moths in a corner. Don't blink or you might miss one. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher