All This Could Be Yours

Like the promise of its title, All This Could Be Yours is full of elusive gifts. Joshua Trotter's debut collection is a metaphysical hall of windows that seem to be mirrors and mirrors presenting themselves as windows. Trotter's poems-which could be the bastard love-children of Stevens and Frost-refract, reflect and deflect with canny puns and rhymes, the rigour of their forms belying the rogue trickster twists of cockeyed logic they take and the po-faced near-sense in which they speak. Don't be fooled into thinking these poems glib: Trotter is often most serious precisely at his most blithe; his poems are always thought-full. Full of “intemperate winds / blown thinking from the ledge, through the gap // between the frame and what it haunts for us,” they resist the intelligence, almost successfully, as Stevens said a poem should.