Composing Voices

Robert Pack's new volume of poetry, Composing Voices: A Cycle of Dramatic Monologues, is a fabulously expanded version of his 1984 book, Faces in a Single Tree. In each of the poems a single person is talking to one other person to whom he is intimately related, creating deep dramatic tension: a father talking to a bereaved daughter or puzzled son; a sister confronting a sister gone astray or a brother to whom she is confessing her compromised pregnancy; husband and wife; doctor and patient; lawyer and client. Combined with these human dramas are the dramas of nature. All possible human concerns are excavated in these poems: humans and God, humans and the environment, humans and their most significant others, including pet monkeys and ghosts.