David Bottoms is a poet of southern-style suburban pastoral. The woods are a little nearer than Bottoms would like, his sky a little threatening overhead. "Family asleep, I walk my worries into the shallow yard," he writes, in a line that could stand in for much of his work. These poems present the vagabond inner life of a man who's made people assurances, given them guarantees; he has a family to care for, a house to keep up, a mortgage.

This temptation to vagrancy pervades Bottoms' work, but he always stops just short of extravagance. Bounded points in time—the "endtimes" of the title—for me imply bounded points in his own poetic style, points he's drawn towards but not willing to cross:

Waltzing through the Endtime, my mother-in-law calls it,
wringing out my spirit
                                      like a dirty dishrag . . .

   Yes, I've always fretted the small stuff,
   and of the thirty thousand souls that depart the earth daily, only three
   enter Paradise

—From Three-quarter Moon and Moment of Grace

Always, in Bottoms, the dead-serious is given its immediate ironic counterweight: "Not even the odds you get in Vegas," Bottoms cracks.

The joke about Vegas, the puns or half-puns (fret the small stuff), the deliberate slouch and twang of Bottoms's syntax, the near-at-hand insights, all function as prospects from which we can see, up ahead, the places Bottoms won't go. Because he won't cross these idiomatic, tonal, and imagistic boundaries he is so powerfully drawn towards, the poems often seem apologetic, mild-mannered, the work of a guy who really wants to be liked. It's a gimcrack manner, and you wince a little at the puns. (Though Bottoms seems like the kind of guy who enjoys seeing people wince at his puns.) When the subject matter is grave enough, though, he'll take the plunge, and the results can be stunning:

My wife's paralegal, a lonely woman and middle-aged, chats up guys
in the cyberlounges
                                 and met one in New York for a weekend rendezvous,
some honcho boss for a labor union in Houston.

Chinatown and Little Italy,
and the night lights over Broadway fractured by a thin mist of sleet...

Then a restaurant, she says, like you see in the movies
and dancing in a bar of dim blue light,
where they tendered each other,
                                                  as Ring Lardner crafts it,

a smile with a future in it.

You don't expect to find Ring Lardner when you start out at the cyberlounge. This careening past idiomatic and discursive boundaries, scarcer than it could be in Bottoms, is invigorating. He's a poet I'd like to see get himself into deeper trouble.

— Dan Chiasson