Most readers encounter poetry, when they encounter it at all, almost by accident, as a column with a ragged right flank that intrudes into the more resolved march of prose in, for example, The New Yorker or The Atlantic. Fortunately, literary journals and little magazines afford poetry an arena of its own. And sometimes, as in the VQR, we may find an author represented by a cluster of poems, which gives us a better chance to intuit some sense of the poet's overall sensibility. But no selection can really substitute for an entire volume of poems by an author in self-conscious charge of his or her vocation. While not every poem will be equally compelling, the best collections give readers the chance "to make progress," as Frost puts it, "by circulation." The shrapnel of deconstruction notwithstanding, one of the chief aesthetic pleasures of a new collection of poems will continue to be the opportunity it grants to experience, to imagine, the tacit wholeness of a sensibility percolating through its apparently discrete forms. Of course, since poetry is not mathematics, that unity is always putative and never complete; and, in less accomplished work, it may be superficial or absent entirely. Anyone who reads a generous sampling of the year's poetry will be rewarded with potent evidence that, even in an increasingly discontinuous universe, the centripetal energy of the analogical imagination remains an authentic countervailing force. But, at the same time, that reader will also be struck by how much verse merely mimes the fragmented quotidian. In most collections, too many poems simply do not seem inevitable. The works now under consideration comprise a few of the exceptions: they have palpably been driven into form by central urgencies of the poet's being, galvanized by a sense of vocation that amounts to vision.