For Dear Life

The title of Ronald Wallace's new collection reads like a dedication: For Dear Life. In the long list of Wallace's poetic gifts, perhaps the greatest is his ability to affirm our brief existence in spite of everything. The fact that we live, and can tell the tale—even of our own demise—is, Wallace shows, a miracle and a blessing beyond measure. I say of this fine book, as Wallace says of life itself, 'All the news is good.'

With his signature humor and elegant wit, Ron Wallace makes clear that the 'dear life' of the title is what he's holding on for. This is a death-inflected collection, filled with meditations upon illness and aging that refuse to buckle in the face of the unspeakable. His wrenching elegies and playful celebrations of the self are always buoyed by his understanding of the richness of experience. Ronald Wallace's touch is remarkably light even when his heart is heavy.

Wallace's is a poetry of rare honesty, the kind of emotional honesty that gives us the story behind the story: As in Chinese painting, a few quick—but perfect—strokes illuminate the subject and bring it to life. It is poetry of an uncanny sensory keenness, which graces the stories he tells simultaneously with zest and sorrow, and makes us aware, even at the simplest moments, of the eternal tug-of-war between life and death.

Ronald Wallace's poems ring with the emotional truth of what it means to be part of the world's fragile commerce. He has the knack of trafficking in the serious without ever going solemn on the reader. If Emily Dickinson had slept with Buster Keaton, this poet might have been their bundle of cockeyed joy.