A collection of poems exploring reality and dreams.

MacDonald divides this poetry collection into six sections, including “Dreamlands,” “History Noir,” “A Sense of Freedom,” “The Puzzles of Love and Poetics,” “Illusions and Delusions,” and “Nature’s Mysterious Ways.” Each blends the practical and the prismatic in whimsical, sometimes unpredictable ways; a quick look at carbohydrates in the diet, for instance, gives way to a meditation on solitary confinement: “In self-imposed, solitary house arrest, / So I can have my last meal / Of spaghetti and meatballs / Every day.” The poems are written in loose, unstructured free verse and are usually two to three dozen lines long. There are occasional, casual literary allusions, as in “Pay the Ferryman: The Ultimate Journey,” which refers to Charon, the guide of the dead in Greek mythology: “After the dark winters of their eloquence, / Not as a debt, but as a profound homage, / We rest gold on their blackened tongues, / So the ferryman can escort these artists / To the blissful, sweet Elysian Fields.” Alternating with these more literary efforts are droll entries like “The World is Flat,” which begins, “The world is flat / Shouts the flat earth cadre.” Occasionally, MacDonald’s conceits feel overly simplistic, as in “Snake Dance” where the speaker muses, “What if we could shed our skin like the cobra / And live a new life every few months.” The language sometimes registers as shallow or silly, as in “Nature’s Neglected Heroes of War,” which celebrates the messenger pigeons of WWI: “these soaring, feathered athletes / Were much more than little bird brains.” On balance, however, the poems are briskly enjoyable as they ask their open-ended questions, like in “The Hidden Life”: “Can we camouflage our souls / So no one can peer in / And know us purely / And judge us unkindly / And curse the intentions / That we never wish / To reveal?”

A mostly sharp and thought-provoking body of poems.