Steve Scafidi is an immensely talented poet whose fourth collection, The Cabinetmaker’s Window, reveals a sustained interest in addressing the great and eternal themes of poetry—Love, Death, Time, Divinity, Art—and simultaneous willingness to take both material and formal risks. In a poetic landscape preferential to cerebral abstraction, the stylized posturing of ennui, or à la mode politicking, Mr. Scafidi offers a welcome—often-ebullient, occasionally-crass, but markedly uplifting and humble—voice. His tone calls to mind the heartiness of a medieval troubadour; his form and vision, the rough narrative charms of an Anglo-Saxon scop stretching his lyrical legs to tromp with gusto through the real, gritty particulars of the dirt and flesh in which we live.

The particular stomping ground of The Cabinetmaker’s Window is, geographically-speaking, small: Mr. Scafidi’s poems are predominantly set in a woodshop, a home, and the roads that go between. What this focused scope allows for, however, is a concentrated education in place, and one of Mr. Scafidi’s particular preoccupations is in defining how such immersion over a duration shapes us actively and passively, physically and emotionally. In the opening poem, for example, the speaker describes the woodshop where he works and how, in his day-in and day-out presence there, the place itself gets on him:

…Sometimes skunks fight under the floorboards

at night and when you walk in—in the morning
you begin to reek of it and by the end of the day
you are fouled with that deep musk of skunk.

And sometimes sanding a small eucalyptus box
made in China 100 years ago the astringency of
the medicine tree fills the barn and clears your head.

We cook chicken and beans, venison stew and corn
bread and sausage and Bill’s wife sent him to work
today with three shrimps covered in coconut sauce.

But mostly it is coffee in the air or the peppery
sharp odor of sawn walnut that smells purple.
Mahogany dust has little claws that tear your eyes

and grip at your insides…

In The Cabinetmaker’s Window, humans are largely defined by the places they inhabit: we breathe in their air; we take on their scent; our bodies respond to their properties with watery eyes, wrinkled noses, cramping stomachs. And our emotions respond too: with disgust, delight, awe. Nor, apparently, should we want to escape such influence. Firmly in the lineage of poets committed to the adoration of the commonplace—Whitman, Williams, and Crane as well as, more recently, Levine and Levis—Mr. Scafidi is in search of a way to celebrate our entanglement in the world, even in its strangest and ugliest influences. Among the myriad unlikely exigencies he discovers for praise are the whiff of a septic tank, road kill, a mohawked and potbellied carpenter, a robot made of tin cans, and horse dung. More traditionally-lovely (though equally uncommon) details are lauded as well: ink drying on a page, a one-horned deer, brass trophies in the sunlight of a high school atrium, and what is, to my mind, one of the most surprising and delightful of all—“the distance between the turning of a key / and the roar and purr of a diesel truck.” Of course, underlying this drive toward celebration is commemoration: the particular modus operandi of pressing in to the world rather than leaning aloofly away and the near-obsessive desire to catalog, describe, know, and, thereby, somehow, possess or preserve the world are the foils repeatedly offered to the incessant passage of Time. This pursuit becomes the primary organizing principle of the collection, each poem an opportunity for Mr. Scafidi to test, re-test, and find satisfying to varying degrees all the most likely and timeworn antidotes to oblivion: procreation (“Thank-You Wishes for the Wilderness”), material legacy (“The Chisel”), friendships (“Two Cabinetmakers”), and art (“Looking for the Maker’s Name”).

Of all the counters to death that Mr. Scafidi explores though, it is art, perhaps not surprisingly, that appears as the most convincing. Through experimentation in form and syntax, Mr. Scafidi models the likely untold ways poetry can spellbind. There are more than a handful of lyrics in The Cabinetmaker’s Window that—due to adept use of internal rhyme, enjambed lines, a colloquial tone, and a rambling style—sweep the reader up into what feels like a sort of enchantment, allowing us to momentarily forget any time but the metric time of the verse. In particular, the poems “You Should, Said Socrates, Sing a Charm Over Him Every Day Until You Have Charmed Away His Fears,” “Music for the Word Perhaps,” “Lines for the Atrium of a High School,” The Cabinetmaker’s Window,” and, likely my favorite poem in the collection, “Thank You Lord for the Dark Ablaze,” function in this way. Look, for example, how in this latter poem we are swept up in the tetrameter lines, lifted and set down and lifted again by what I can only describe as a turning or cranking sort of rhythm, one based in internal and slant rhymes that fade in and out just forcefully enough to propel us forward:

“Thank You Lord for the Dark Ablaze—”

For the deer gut busted open splayed
on the gravel margin of the highway
to remind me and to horrify which are
the same when death comes to say
anything for dying is a song the body
is learning so thank you lord for this
enduring whir of days we ride the way
a chisel carves down deep as it glides
for being is a lathe and we are the turning
curving shape of what I come to praise
so thank you Lord for the edge of light
when the day is honed and all is bright
behind the eyes…

Nevertheless, for all Mr. Scafidi’s excitement and persistence in the project of endurance, there are moments and, indeed, entire poems, where his hopefulness falters, even collapsing entirely. Poems of deep, apparently-unredeemable despair are peppered throughout the collection and provide a counter-balance and necessary, darker undercurrent. In “Triumph of the Jabberwock,” for example, a father holds his stillborn daughter, moving her lifeless limbs as if in a dance—a macabre metaphor for art’s inability to, in any literal way, restore life; in “Song for the Carry-On,” the reader is shown a plane crashing out of the sky as the speaker below stands dumbstruck, unable to find and words of consolation beyond “…it’s OK— // It’s OK”; and in “Driving Around,” as if to acknowledge the rhetorical paucity of language in light of particularly extreme violence and tragedy, we are given the story of a father who has a mental breakdown and murders his son, to which the speaker responds: “There are many things that are never ok. Most. / Don’t ever tell me anything is ok. Don’t ever / tell me nothing.” These moments of seeming resignation, however, though perhaps in one sense a deathblow to the poet’s ambition, are, ultimately, essential to making the collection work as a whole. They give death teeth, making clear that the act of creation as a mode of endurance is more than just an exercise in whimsy. Moreover, they render Mr. Scafidi’s more ebullient moments believable.

If there is a critical bullet Mr. Scafidi will be asked to dodge, it will likely be the charge of sentimentalism. The poet anticipates this, confessing in “Song for the Holy Ghost” that “…Love, you are my only word / it seems. You have made me difficult / to be taken seriously by most.” And indeed there are moments where the particular concoction of images asked to serve as springboard for heightened emotion or revelation are, as the poet Ronald Bottrall has said, “Fused in no emotive furnace.” This is, of course, the risk a poet takes in placing a heavy and central burden on detail and imagery to mean: though such moments in The Cabinetmaker’s Window are rare, I do think of the ultimate image of “This Page,” in which sunlight lingers on a page of verse as the speaker sits among the ruins of his life. Interestingly, the poems that seem to be most likely to be considered fine by contemporary critics—the politically-charged “Wartime” or the condescendingly-terse five-liner “On the Rebel Flag over My Neighbor’s House,” seemed the least comfortable to me in these pages. In a remarkably cohesive collection—a testimony to Mr. Scafidi’s maturity as a poet as well as poet Dave Smith’s editorial skill as the architect behind the Southern Messenger Poets series—these seemed too sarcastic and coy to fit smoothly into Mr. Scafidi’s hopeful and persistently industrious vision.

Nevertheless, as the poet James Dickey—one of the harshest but most consistently, to my mind, correct critics who has ever written—has said that the mark of a poet who will produce work that matters is his ability to sustain and perpetually regenerate enthusiasm. Mr. Scafidi has this trait in spades. In The Cabinetmaker’s Window, Mr. Scafidi appears as a poet who is nearly instantaneously able to absorb the reader into his ultra-sensory, physical, filigreed way of perceiving the world; sell them the dire import of his particular concerns, cares, and loves; and leave them believing verse can itself be a way of creating and sustaining hope. If that is not a way for poetry to help us survive, I’m not sure what is.